The American
Revolution:
1 766-1 776
Sir George Otto
Trevelyan
REESE LIBRARY
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA.
Otis*
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THE
AMERICAN REVOLUTION
Part II. — Volume I.
1
BY THE SAME AUTHOR.
THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION.
Part I. 1 766-1 776.
8vo.
LONGMANS, GREEN, & CO.,
New York, London, and Bombay.
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THE
AMERICAN REVOLUTION
Part II
BY THE RIGHT HON.
SIR GEORGE OTTO TREVELYAN, BART.
AUTHOR OF " THE LIFE AND LETTERS OF LORD MACALLAY "
AND "THE EARLY HISTORY OF CHARLES JAMES FOX "
f
r
IN TWO VOLUMES
VOL. I.
SECOND EDITION
LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.
91 and 93 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK
LONDON AND BOMBAY
I904
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\fsX- I
CornaoHT, 1903, »y
LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.
AU righto reurvtd.
First Edition, August, 1903.
Second Edition, January, 1904.
J. 8. Cubing * Co. - Berwick & Smith Co.
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THESE VOLUMES ARE DEDICATED
TO THE BELOVED MEMORY
OF
EDWARD ERNEST BOVVEN
AND
HENRY SIDGWICK
" Anima, quales ntque candidiores
Terra tultt, ntque queis me sit devinctior alter."
CONTENTS
OF PART II.. VOL. I.
CHAPTER I
The news from America ....... i
Horace Walpole and John Wesley 4
The unpopularity of the Cabinet ...... 9
The Ministry invite Loyal Addresses ..... lo
Lord North's uneasiness 15
The responsibility of Government for the American difficulty . l6
The American Petition 19
Retirement of the Duke of Grafton 23
Lord Rochford ......... 26
Lord George Germaine 28
CHAPTER II
Numerical weakness of the British army 3a
The King^ energy 34
Application for soldiers to Russia 3;
The German military system ....... 37
The Brunswick Contingent 43
The Landgrave of Hesse 4$
Effect produced in America by the hiring of foreign troops . 49
Debate in the Lords on the German Treatic •-, .... 50
Action taken in the Commons 53
Charles Fox 37
The Prohibitory Bill in the Lower House . . . 59
vU
Vlll CONTENTS
PACE
Hot discussion in the Peers ; Lord Lyttclton and the Duke of
Richmond ......... 63
Lord Mansfield 67
CHAPTER II!
The Strategy of the impending campaign . ... 69
Canada after the British Conquest ...... 71
Sir Guy Carleton and the Quebec Act 74
The American Invasion of Canada 78
Ethan Allen and Benedict Arnold 79
Fall of Montgomery, and disasters of the Americans . . 81
General Sullivan 84
Carleton prepares to invade the rebellious colonies ... 87
Admiral Lord Howe 90
Composition of General Howe's army 92
Excellence of our regimental officers 9S
Lieutenant-Colonel Mark ham 97
The life on a transport 99
High quality of our soldiers 101
CHAPTER IV
Anomalous character of the American Congress . . . 105
Changed feeling on the question of National Independence . 107
Dickinson and the Adamses . . ill
Publication of letters written by John Adams . . ■ . Il6
His great influence in Congress Il8
The business-like tone of that Assembly ; Patrick Henry . 119
The Reverend William Gordon and George Washington . 122
The fate of Gordon's history 126
Congress recommends the re-constitution of the Provincial
Governments . . . . . . . . • i?7
Rapid advance made towards the accomplishment of that
process 128
CONTENTS ix
CHAPTER V
Importance of Pennsylvania, and of Philadelphia . . . 133
Parties in the colony : the Pennsylvania Assembly . . . 134
The Quakers and the Revolution . . . . . . 139
The Whig Coup d'etat 145
Thomas Paine 147
" Common Sense r published 148
Success of the work 130
A Committee appointed to draw up the Declaration . ■ 1SS
Debate on the Virginia Resolution . . . . . .156
The Declaration of Independence 157
Adams and Jefferson . 168
fHAPTF.R VI
Washington at Boston . . . . . . . -172
Lord Stirling 176
Washington shifts his quarters to New York .... 180
The American militia-men 182
Their homesickness ........ 188
Their officers 194
Jealousy between the State Contingents 195
Washington's Staff 202
His want of cavalry and artillerymen 205
His Commissariat 208
The marksmanship of the American soldiers .... 208
Their aptitude for field-fortification . 212
Washington's Engineers 213
Religious feeling in the Nation, and in the Army . . . ail
CHAPTER VII
Philip Schuyler 219
The small-pox ......... 222
X
CONTENTS
r »< ;it
Gates withdraws to Ticonderoga 229
Benedict Arnold, and the fleet on Lake Champlain . 230
General Howe arrives at Sandy Hook 237
Governor Tryon 230,
Loyalism in the State of New York 244
The strategical situation 248
Admiral Howe enters New York Bay 251
The negotiations ......... 255
Visit of Franklin and Adams to Staten Island . 263
CHAPTER VIII
The British cross over to Long Island 267
Washington's arrangements for the defence of Brooklyn . 273
Putnam to command on Long Island 275
The Battle 277
Critical position of the American army 284
The retreat across the Kast River 290
The question of the retention, or abandonment, of New York
city 292
Howe lands on Manhattan Island, and captures New York . 297
The fight of Haerlem 300
CHAPTER IY
Howe's dilatory tactics 306
The great Fire in New York 309
The British army transported to Westchester Peninsula . .311
The Battle of White Plains 313
Colonel Har court 316
Self-confidence of the Americans 320
Advance of Sir Guy Carleton 323
Battle off Valcour Island 324
Carleton occupies Crown Point, and then withdraws to Canada 329
CONTENTS XI*
PACK
Depletion of the American army 333
Howe threatens Fort Washington 337
Wealth and conservatism of the Westchester farmers . . 338
Their treatment by the Hessians 341
American outrages . 345
Howe's attitude in regard to marauding, as compared with that
of Washington 348
APPENDICES
I. Washington and the Reverend William Gordon . . 3 go
II. Extracts from Amos Farnsworth's Diary . . . 351
At the end of the volume
Map of the Country which was the Scene of Operations of the
Northern Army.
Map of the Northern Part of New Jersey, and of New York and
its Environs.
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V
UN'* SITY
THE A% "^ICAN REVOLUTION
CHAPTER I
POLITICAL DISCONTENT IN ENGLAND. THE LOYAL
ADDRESSES. A LAST CHANCE FOR PEACE
The news of Lexington took six weeks to reach Eng-
land, and came by an unusual channel. Massachusetts
was eager to have the first word, but careful that that
word should be an accurate one. A committee ap-
pointed by her Provincial Congress held sittings in the
district which had been the scene of hostilities, and took
a large mass of evidence on oath. An account of the
battle, addressed to the Inhabitants of Great Britain,
was drawn up by another committee, over which Joseph
Warren himself presided. The narrative was studiously
moderate. The successes of the minute-men, and the
disasters of the British, were related briefly, and in terms
below the truth ; as if the writers could not dwell with
satisfaction on the details of a conflict between fellow-
countrymen. Americans, (so it was stated,) had no
quarrel with their sovereign, whose person, family, and
crown they were as willing to defend as ever. But
they would face death rather than tamely submit to the
persecutions of a cruel ministry, and looked forward
with assured hope to the time when, in a constitutional
connection with the mother-country, Englishmen on
both sides of the Atlantic would live, always and all
together, as one free, united, and happy people.
Captain Derby of Salem was commissioned to fit out
his ship as a packet ; and the document was committed
IT. 1 1.— VOL. I. B
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THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
to his charge, with orders to deliver it into the hands
of the Agent for Massachusetts in England. On the
twenty-ninth of May, 1775, the leading London news-
papers, which then appeared only three times a week,
published the story in a special issue ; and it was repro-
duced by the provincial journals as fast as the mail bags
could be carried through the island.
The ministers, who were as yet without information,
sent up and down the City in search of Captain Derby ;
but he was hard to find, and, when found, he would say
nothing. Lord Dartmouth was deeply affected by the
intelligence, and could not bear to discuss it. Governor
Hutchinson in vain insisted that the paper was inspired
by Adams ; that the master of the ship belonged to
"one of the most incendiary families;" and that
General Gage, when he came to be heard, would put a
very different complexion upon the matter. Dartmouth
had seen the colonists on their best side, and knew them
for men most unlikely to invent and to set afloat an
offensive and humiliating tale which a few hours, or at
latest a few days, would prove to be unfounded.
A sloop bringing the official despatches had started
four days before Captain Derby, and arrived eleven
days behind him. The account of the affair in the
" London Gazette," when read by itself, was not of a
very alarming character. It was admitted that the
British force had retired, and that before and during
the retreat they had been annoyed by rebel sharp-
shooters. Several of the regulars had been killed and
wounded in one place, and some few in another. The
officers had distinguished themselves, and the men had
behaved with their customary intrepidity. Gage had
his own way of putting a case; but the traditions of
honesty which govern our War Office are sternly re-
gardless of a commander's susceptibilities. The return
of losses, faithfully and minutely presented to the pub-
lic, showed that the fighting had been very serious. As
for the general military result of the whole proceeding,
it was confessed that the Northern Colonies had risen
POLITICAL DiLiONTENT tk^^NQLAND 3
in arms, and that Boston was closely invested by a force
of insurgents three times the size of the royal garrison.
On the twenty-fifth of July came the story of Bunker's
Hill. This time there was a victory, and, according to
the text of Gage's despatches, a victory without a draw-
back. Nothing was said about the attacks which had
failed; and yet those failures, retrieved as they were,
signally enhanced the credit of our arms. In his report
of Lexington the general had coolly taken it for granted
that the loss of the Americans was much greater than
our own : a groundless assumption, which the authori-
ties at home had the good sense to keep out of the
Gazette. But at Bunker's Hill the field remained in his
own possession, and the slain lay there for everyone to
count ; and so he fell back upon the theory that during
the action the colonists had been busily employed in
carrying off their dead friends and burying them in
holes. There is no stronger proof of the military
quality of our race than the disgust which that deplora-
ble excuse for not having killed enough of the enemy
has always excited even among our civilians. It is
the way of our people to measure the importance of
an engagement by its practical consequences, and to
regard the statistics of the adversary's loss as the
adversary's own concern. 1 Every reader of the news-
papers was well aware that the circuit of the American
lines was still untouched ; that the battle had resulted
in the occupation of a small peninsula which hitherto
had been no-man's land ; and that the acquisition was
purchased by a great slaughter of British soldiers, and
1 The dignified attitude of a fine soldier with regard to this question is
exemplified in Napier's account of the first battle of Sauroren. It was the
turning point of the nine terrible days in the Pyrenees, and a conflict
which Lord Wellington, fresh from the fight, with homely emphasis called
bludgeon work. " Two generals and eighteen hundred men had been
killed or wounded on the French side, following their official reports ; a
number far below the estimate made at the time by the allies, whose loss
amounted to two thousand six hundred. The numbers actually engaged
were of French twenty-five thousand, of the allies twelve thousand ; and,
if the strength of the latter's position did not save them from the greater
loss, their steadfast courage is more to be admired."
B 2
*> 1
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THE AM ERIC AX REVOLUTION
something very like a massacre of British officers.
Private letters from the army showed that old cam-
paigners did not under-rate the cost, or exaggerate the
value, of the triumph which they had won. The colo-
nel who led the Light Infantry companies against the
rail-fence, and for a marvel had not been shot, informed
his friends at home that the rebels had behaved beyond
any idea which he could ever have formed of them, and
predicted that every inch of ground still remaining to be
conquered would be stiffly disputed. "We have lost,"
he said, "a great number of our officers; I am told,
above eighty killed and wounded ; a great smash by
such miscreants." 1 In the interior circle of the Minis-
try there were no illusions. William Eden, a young
politician just on the eve of being taken into office, wrote
to Lord North on the third of August : " We certainly
are victorious ; but if we have eight more such victories
there will be nobody left to bring the news of them." 2
No intelligence more unexpected, or more visibly
and inevitably fraught with coming evil, ever reached
this country. The spirit in which it was accepted was
honourable to our ancestors. There were few truer
patriots among them than John Wesley and Horace Wal-
pole; and they both sadly acknowledged Great Britain's
responsibility for an event which they viewed as the
common calamity of the entire British race. Walpole
had been born and nurtured amidst the stable and quiet
prosperity which the nation enjoyed under his father's
rule, and he had witnessed the conquests and glories of
Lord Chatham. He now, after the break of a month in
his correspondence with Sir Horace Mann at Florence,
took up his pen unwillingly, since he had nothing pleas-
ant to tell. " Can the events of a civil war be welcome
news ? One must be deeply embarked on one side or
the other, if one ever rejoices. They who wish well to
the whole can have but one cheerful moment, which is
that of peace, — a moment that seems at a great dis-
1 Historical Manuscripts Commission: Eleventh Report, Appendix,
Part V.
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POLITICAL DISCONTENT IN ENGLAND 5
tance. During the first part of my life all was peace
and happiness. The middle was a scene of triumph.
I am sorry to think the last volume so likely to resemble
a considerable part of our story. Who can wish to have
lived during the wars of York and Lancaster, or from
1641 to 1660?"
Walpole, even while he sate in Parliament, confined
himself to the functions of an observer, and, so far as
his own exertions were concerned, allowed public affairs
to take their own course ; but John Wesley was one of
those who could not be tranquil until he had cleared his
conscience. He addressed the prime minister in a
memorial, of remarkable ability, couched in the form of
a private letter. It was the production of a statesman,
and of a prophet likewise ; for the paper is dated two
days before the battle of Bunker's Hill. u I am a high
churchman," (so he told Lord North,) "the son of a
high churchman, bred up since my childhood in the
highest notions of passive obedience and non-resistance.
And yet I cannot avoid thinking, if I think at all, that
an oppressed people asked for nothing more than their
legal rights, in the most modest and inoffensive manner
that the nature of the thing would allow. But, waiving
all considerations of right and wrong, I ask, is it com-
mon sense to use force towards the Americans ? These
men will not be frightened. They are as strong men as
you. They are as valiant as you, if not more abundantly
valiant, for they are one and all enthusiasts for liberty."
Wesley gave North the benefit of his own personal
knowledge of America, revived and supplemented as it
was by frequent communication with the colonies, where
he had a substantial and rapidly increasing body of re-
ligious adherents. He warned the prime minister to
beware of those who spoke soft words, and who dwelt
on the circumstance that the colonists were divided
among themselves. " No, my lord," he said, " they are
terribly united ; not in New England only, but down as
low as the Jerseys and Pennsylvania. The bulk of the
people are so united, that to speak a word in favour of
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THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
the present English measures would almost endanger a
man's life. Those who informed me of this are no
sycophants ; they say nothing to curry favour ; they
have nothing to gain or lose by me." And then the
famous preacher, who was such a master of condensa-
tion, shortly and frankly exposed the difficulties of a
war conducted across a vast ocean, and with Europe
hostile. It is impossible to read that plain and forcible
statement without reflecting on the lamentable fact that
the middle class of citizens, to which Wesley belonged,
was to all intents and purposes excluded from the
higher administration of the country.
The most important paragraph in Wesley's letter
contained his description of the temper and the tone
which prevailed among the great mass of the common
people throughout the kingdom. His remarks were
not the carpings of a political opponent. Wesley was
no ordinary supporter of the Government. He was
soon to give as singular a proof as man ever gave that
his partisanship knew no limits when the King and the
King's ministers stood in need of a defender. Still less
did his conclusions about the trend of popular opinion
proceed from slight or hasty observation ; for he was
intimately acquainted with Ireland and Scotland, and
England he knew as a benevolent and active-bodied
country gentleman knows his paternal estate. He had
already for five-and-thirty years been traversing the
land from Berwick to Penzance, and from Tenby to
Colchester ; going everywhere on horseback, and read-
ing as he rode, in accordance with his comfortable
theory that safety for an equestrian lies in a loose rein ;
but keeping his eyes and ears open for anything that
was worth his notice. With him one day told another,
and one night, (and short nights they were,) certified
another. On Monday the seventeenth of June, 1782,
he preached in the morning at Rothbury in Northum-
berland; rode in sultry heat twelve miles southward,
over a road which still retains some of its terrors, and
preached again at noon in front of a solitary cottage ;
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POLITICAL DISCONTENT IN ENGLAND 7
and then, after travelling twenty miles more, he de-
livered his third sermon to an immense multitude, hard
by the old Priory at Hexham. That was how he spent
his seventy-ninth birthday, when he was already con-
scious that he was beginning to grow old. But in 1775
he was in all the vigour and energy of three score
years and twelve; and, if anyone had special oppor-
tunities of ascertaining what homely and unprivileged
people all the country over were thinking and saying
among themselves, it was John Wesley, and no other.
After commenting to Lord North on the defenceless
state of Great Britain, and the threatening attitude of
foreign powers, Wesley went on to say that the most
dangerous enemies of the Government were those of
their own household. He had conversed, (so he
claimed,) more freely, and with more persons of every
denomination, than anyone else in the three kingdoms ;
he was familiar with the general disposition of the
people, — English, Scotch, and Irish, — and he knew
for certain that a large majority were bitterly angry
and profoundly disaffected. 1
Two months afterwards Lord Dartmouth had his
turn, and received a letter which was a striking ex-
ample of the truth that there is no speaking so plain
as between like and like. Great man as he was, the
Secretary of State held religious opinions which placed
him within the circle of those disciples whom Wesley,
when he saw occasion for it, was in the habit of rebuk-
ing very roundly. The Cabinet had got reports to the
effect that trade was flourishing, and that the popula-
tion was well employed and well satisfied. The ex-
pression of Dartmouth's innocent gratification over the
intelligence had come round to Wesley, who wrote to
his friend as follows : " Sir, there cannot be a more
notorious falsehood than has been palmed upon the
Administration for truth. In every part of England
where I have been, (and I have been East, West, North,
1 The Life and Times of the Aev 4 . John Wesley, by the Rev. L. Tyerman :
Vol. III., pages 197-200.
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THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
and South within these two years,) trade is exceedingly
decayed, and thousands of people are quite unemployed.
I except three or four manufacturing towns, which
have suffered less than others. I aver that the people
in general, all over the nation, are so far from being
well satisfied that they are far more deeply dissatisfied
than they appear to have been even a year or two
before the Great Rebellion, and far more dangerously
dissatisfied. The bulk of the people in every city,
town, and village where I have been do not so much
aim at ministry, but at the King himself. They heartily
despise his Majesty, and hate him with a perfect hatred.
It is as much as ever I can do, and sometimes more
than I can do, to keep this plague from infecting my
own friends; and nineteen out of twenty to whom I.
speak in defence of the King seem never to have heard
a word spoken for him before. I wonder what wretches
they are who abuse the credulity of the ministry by
those florid accounts." 1
Such, according to a competent judge who disliked
the conclusions to which he found himself driven, was
the feeling in Great Britain when the American Revo-
lution began. The condition of opinion that prevailed
among the commonalty of England, by which Wesley
was so painfully impressed, did not fill a large space
in the thoughts of the political actors of the day. Cabi-
net Ministers, — and, during the earlier years of the
war, the statesmen of the Opposition too, — made little
account of the tradesmen, and yeomen, and small manu-
facturers who gave bed and board to an itinerant
Methodist preacher ; and still less of the mill-hands and
colliers who, year by year, listened to his sermons with
growing respect and in ever larger numbers. Those
were not the sort of people who raised and upset gov-
ernments. The voteless multitude which stood, row
behind row, drinking in John Wesley's message in
the green amphitheatre at St. Ives, outnumbered many
» Hiitorical Manuscripts Commission : Fifteenth Report, Appendix,
Part I.
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POLITICAL DISCONTENT IN ENGLAND 9
times the aggregate constituencies of all those Cornish
villages which between them sent forty-two members to
Westminster. Even the solid business-men of the coun-
ties, freeholders as they were, each of them possessed but
the three hundredth, or four hundredth, part of the
political power exercised by the burgage-holder of a
close borough, or the Councilman of a Corporation
which negotiated parliamentary elections in the silence
and privacy of their town-hall. Thoughtful and pa-
triotic citizens of the middle and lower classes were dis-
heartened by a sense of their own powerlessness. They
were disheartened, but gravely displeased; and their
displeasure was all the more ominous because it could
not be favourably affected by a circumstance which in
this country, ever since 1832, has mitigated, and often
extinguished, political exasperation.
It may be doubted whether any Cabinet, which has
once completely lost the confidence of the nation, ever
recovers reputation during its tenure of office. But in
the course of the last two generations few serious public
evils have resulted from the unpopularity of Govern-
ments, because, when a Government has become un-
popular, its fall is only a question of a session or two at
the longest. In 1775, however, the discredit and dislike
under which the administration suffered were of old
date; but there had been no real change of ministry.
For ten years past Secretaries of State, and even First
Lords of the Treasury, had been installed and ejected,
and thrust up-stairs and down-stairs ; but, whoever
might be left out or put out, the King and the King's
friends had always been in. During that period elec-
toral rights had been trodden under foot ; free discus-
sion had been treated as a crime; venality had spread fast,
and in alarming volume, through every department of the
state; and a singular indifference had been exhibited
by rulers to the sentiments and opinions of the ruled.
The reason was not far to seek. Court favour had come
to be the one sure way of obtaining and holding those
honours which ought to be at the disposal of the people.
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THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
Public men knew only too well that, if they opposed
the faction which pulled the hidden strings of politics,
they soon lost all opportunity of serving the Crown.
If they submitted to that faction, they lost the respect
of their country. 1 In the finest piece which ever came
from under his pen Burke pronounced this circumstance,
and this only, to be the cause of what as long back as
1770 he called the Present Discontents. No remedy
had been applied ; and in the year 1 775 they were the
present discontents still, with sharpness added. In the
May of that year John Wesley solemnly warned Lord
North that the bulk of the population were effectually
cured of all love and reverence for the King and
his Ministry, that they were ripe for open rebellion, and
that they wanted nothing but a leader. The prediction
was only partially verified; for our country had the
same good fortune which has attended her at more than
one great crisis of her history. A leader, hailing from
a quarter whence he was least expected, successfully
brought her people not into open rebellion, but into
constitutional resistance to that unconstitutional influ-
ence which began by corrupting the parliament, and
ended by half ruining the nation.
In the summer of 1775 Charles Fox was not yet in a
position to proclaim a general crusade against that sys-
tem of personal government the baleful foundation of
which his own father had done so much to lay. But,
with or without a leader, the mood of the people por-
tended ill for a ministry, which was already face to face
with a colonial rebellion, and was pursuing a policy
almost certain to result, sooner or later, in a whole hand-
ful of foreign wars. It was a moment of peril to the
Cabinet, and a day of possible salvation for the empire.
On the twenty-third of August Burke wrote thus to
Lord Rockingham : " The hinge between war and
peace is a dangerous juncture to ministers; but a
1 Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents. The works of
Edmund Burke ; edition of 1S37, pages 142 and 149 of Vol. I.
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THE LOYAL ADDRESSES
II
determined state of the one or the other is a pretty safe
position. When their cause, however absurdly, is made
the cause of the nation, the popular cry will be with
them. The style will be, that their hands must be
strengthened by an universal confidence. When that
cry is once raised, the puny voice of reason will not be
heard." Sandwich and North knew the situation every
bit as well as Burke, and a great deal better than the
virtuous and diffident Whig nobleman whom Burke was
in vain inciting to energetic action. The ministers
exerted themselves to tide over the next few months
with an appearance, at any rate, of having the country
behind them. A Loyal Address, calling upon the Crown
to suppress the rebels, and reflecting with severity upon
their aiders and abettors in the British Parliament, was
welcomed, (and, if need was, invited,) from any com-
munity which contained enough people of weight and
standing who were willing to sign it.
The scheme obtained a certain measure of success ;
but it was not much to the taste of the monarch. A
writer, who has mastered his case, remarks that the
capacity of George the Third embraced the arts of ob-
taining power, but that our history can hardly produce
a sovereign less capable of governing an empire ; 1 and
the description is correct in all particulars. The gain-
ing and keeping of political influence was the King's
special province; and in that department of public
affairs he knew all which was worth knowing. He
thoroughly understood the conditions under which he
pursued the central object of his existence. He held
that petitions, addresses, associations of freeholders, and
open meetings in shire-towns, were the weapons of a
popular opposition, which an arbitrary minister would
do well to abstain from handling. He instinctively fore-
saw the time when the machinery of a political propa-
ganda would be set in motion with formidable results to
the cause which he had at heart. " It is impossible," he
1 Page xiv of Sir William Anson's preface to the Autobiography of the
Third Duke of Grafion: London, 1898.
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THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
wrote to North, " to draw up a more dutiful and affec-
tionate address than the one from the town of Man-
chester, which really gives me pleasure, as it comes
unsolicited. As you seem desirous that this spirit should
be encouraged I certainly will not object to it ; though
by fatal experience I am aware that they will occa-
sion counter-petitions." His Majesty proceeded to indi-
cate that, if the nobility and gentry of property, in their
respective counties, would add half a guinea to the
bounty for recruits to fill the regiments destined for
America, they would be doing at least as real a service
as by affixing their signatures to Loyal Addresses, how-
ever bravely worded.
The Manchester Address was said to have emanated
from old Jacobites whom the King had converted into
Hanoverians by his adoption of the Stuart principles
and processes. Mason, in an epigram poor enough to
have been written by the Poet Laureate, hinted that the
signatures had been paid for by the Court. But the
King asserted the contrary ; and, when George the Third
stated anything as a matter of fact, and not of opinion,
a fact it was. Other towns, and several counties, imi-
tated the example of Manchester ; but the more impor-
tant communities were intractable, or silent, or spoke
with divided voice. No Address could be obtained from
Edinburgh or Glasgow. The Guild of Merchants in
Dublin thanked those Peers who had opposed the re-
straint of liberty in America; and their view was sup-
ported and enforced by five hundred leading citizens of
Cork, who were Protestants to a man. The King's
apprehensions of the danger involved in an appeal to
public opinion were amply justified. Wherever one
party pronounced itself, the other accepted the challenge.
The Common Council of London, sincerely anxious for
peace, waited on His Majesty with a Petition carefully
weeded of all factious and disrespectful phrases, and
implored him to grant the colonists a breathing-space,
and an opportunity for tendering proposals of accom-
modation. A large number of gentlemen and traders
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THE LOYAL ADDRESSES
in the City of London, — unwilling to be represented
in matters political by any municipal body, however
ancient and dignified, — expressed disapprobation and
abhorrence of the proceedings of some among the Ameri-
can colonies ; and thereupon a still larger number of the
same class in the same city protested that they, for their
part, disapproved and abhorred the measures of the
Government. The Middlesex Justices petitioned deco-
rously in favour of war, and the Middlesex freeholders
noisily and somewhat confusedly against it. A Loyal
Address from the Bristol Corporation was at once
answered by a Loyal Remonstrance from near a thousand
Bristol merchants. In one county the policy of the
Cabinet was endorsed by two hundred among the
inhabitants, and condemned by nineteen hundred, with
the names of two Dukes at the head of the signatures.
A less uncertain sound proceeded from some other quar-
ters. The first Battalion of Devonshire militia, arguing
by platoons, defended the course taken by Ministers,
and denounced the manoeuvres of the Opposition. The
University of Oxford was not less emphatic on the same
side. Burke complained in the House of Commons that
a body of learned and religious people, whose vocation,
(if they could be brought to recognise it,) was to instruct
and train the young, should rush into an intricate political
controversy, and recommend a violent policy with extreme
intemperance of language. He had himself, (he said,)
a son at Oxford ; and he resented that son being told
by grave men that his father was an abettor of rebels.
The sister University was not so amenable as Oxford
to the seductions of the Ministry. Cambridge Whigs
had no love for the clique of London wirepullers which
had provided them with a Chancellor in the person of
the Duke of Grafton, while he was still in the mire of a
famous scandal; and which very nearly contrived to
force the Earl of Sandwich upon them as their High
Steward. While resisting the invasions directed against
the honour of the University they had learned how to
organise and employ their forces; and they now put
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14 THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
their experience to use in defence of political tenets
with which, as they proudly claimed, that University
had long been identified. Prominent among them was
Doctor Richard Watson, the Regius Professor of Divin-
ity; who, on Restoration day in the year 1776, had
courage to preach before the Heads of Colleges a sermon
vindicating the principles of the Great Revolution. The
courtiers of a King, who derived his title from that
Revolution, condemned the sermon as treasonable ; but
Dunning sagely remarked that it contained just such
treason as ought to be preached once a month at St.
James's. Doctor Watson now stoutly refused to call
upon the Government to draw the sword on what he
regarded as the wrong side of a constitutional quarrel ;
and he did not stand alone in his refusal. Lord Rock-
ingham, stirred at last, wrote to testify his indignation
at "the Whig University of Cambridge being called
upon to play the second fiddle to the Tory University
of Oxford" in so lamentable a concert. One of the
Cavendishes, — glad to take any amount of trouble to
associate himself with the great memories of 1688, —
travelled to Cambridge to vote, and brought all the help
he could. But other eminent members of the Opposi-
tion hesitated as to the propriety of 44 going down, as it
were by surprise, to prevent what may be the sense of
the resident persons in the University." There were
no such scruples in the opposite camp. 14 The Tories,"
Doctor Watson reported, 44 beat us by eight votes in the
Whitehood house. They owe their victory to the min-
isterial troops which were poured in from the Admiralty
and Treasury beyond expectation." So close a poll was
no great triumph for Government at a time when the
vast majority of residents at the University were in holy
orders ; when promotion in the Church was the recog-
nised reward of party services; and when the clergy,
as Doctor Watson significantly observed, could hardly
escape having a professional bias to support the powers
that were, be they what they might. 1
1 Doctor Watson to Lord Rockingham; Nov. 25, 1775.
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THE LOYAL ADDRESSES
15
The Ministry had selected their own method for elic-
iting the expression of public opinion ; and they had
consulted the classes from whom they had most reason
to expect a favourable response. Even so, it was im-
possible to natter themselves that the nation accepted
their policy with unanimity, or anything near it. The
responsibility which lay upon the rulers of the country
was exceptionally grave ; because feeling in the country
was so nearly balanced that the executive Government,
with the enormous influence then at its command, could
easily and effectively turn the scale in the direction
either of implacable repression or of patient concilia-
tion. Lord North himself, at every stage of the pro-
tracted business, hated war as cordially as did the leaders
of the Opposition; and he had far stronger personal
motives than any of them to incline him towards pacific
courses. His tranquillity of mind, and his fair reputa-
tion in the history of his country, were both at stake ;
and seldom indeed had the chief of any Cabinet been less
in love with the task on which he was engaged. His
outward bearing was described in a letter written be-
tween the arrival in England of the tidings about Lex-
ington and of the tidings about Bunker's Hill. " His
Lordship dined yesterday according to annual custom
with the West India merchants, upon which occasion he
generally affects to be joyous ; but it was remarked that
he was unusually dull." 1 North, however, served a
master who was his own prime minister, and whose sen-
sations at any given moment were more important
than those of all his councillors together. " Nothing,"
wrote Burke, " can equal the ease, composure, and even
gaiety of the great disposer of all in this lower orb. It
is too much, if not real, for the most perfect King-
craft." 2 There was no affectation about George the
Third's high spirits. He felt the joy of a strong man
who sees his work plain before him. Profoundly dis-
pleased with the Bostonians, and with their sympa-
1 American Archives, letter from London, July 1, 1775.
a Burke to Rockingham; Broad Sanctuary, Aug. 4, 1775.
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16 THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
thisers in America, he looked upon himself as commis-
sioned by Providence to punish them : and he was fully
persuaded that he would be favoured in the undertaking.
" I am not apt," he told Lord Dartmouth, " to be over-
sanguine ; but I cannot help being of opinion that with
firmness and perseverance America will be brought to
submission. If not, old England will, though perhaps
not appear so formidable in the eyes of Europe as at
other periods, but yet will be able to make her rebel-
lious children rue the hour that they cast off obedience.
America must be a colony of England, or treated as
enemy." 1 The construction of these sentences might
be awkward ; but their meaning was plain enough. The
King thought it his duty, if he could, to re-conquer
America ; and at the worst he was resolved, in case she
became independent, to leave her in such a condition of
ruin and exhaustion that she would, for many years to
come, be no great loss or menace to the British Empire.
Anger, from first to last, had played a prominent part
in determining the action of Great Britain. The policy
adopted by the Court, the Ministry, and the Parliamen-
tary Majority was so indefensible on the side of pru-
dence and expediency that its authors were driven to
assume high moral ground, and to represent themselves
to the world as the instruments of justice, bound by an
obligation to inflict merited correction upon an erring
colony. A curious tribute to their point of view has
been paid of late years by ingenious writers in the
United States, who have raised a protest against the
spirit and the style in which the story of their Revolu-
tion has too often been told. Under the impulse of a
wholesome reaction against the inflated panegyric, and
overloaded denunciation, which in past days have formed
the stock in trade of too many American chroniclers,
they especially insist on bringing to a test the estimation
in which the heroes of that Revolution have been popu-
larly held. The biographies of those heroes, it is con-
tended, were to a large degree legends ; the best of them
» The King to Lord Dartmouth; Kew, June 10, 1775.
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THE LOYAL ADDRESSES
17
were human, and the worst very bad indeed ; and from
these premises the conclusion has been deduced that
George the Third and his Cabinet could not have been
so greatly in the wrong. Samuel Adams, we are told,
showed himself unscrupulous as to the means which he
employed in the pursuit of public ends ; John Adams
was vain and sensitive; Arthur Lee, when an envoy
from Congress in Paris, insinuated that his colleague
Silas Deane was a rascal, and Deane openly said the
same of Lee, while Franklin distrusted and disliked
them both ; the merchants of Boston were smugglers,
the mob was ruffianly, and throughout New England
no serious efforts were made by the more respectable
citizens to exact retribution for violence and cruelty
committed against partisans of the Crown. All this may
be valuable history. It may all be worth telling. It is
quite in place as an explanation of the sentiments
excited in the British Parliament by the transactions in
America ; but as an argument for or against the wisdom
of the British policy it is of no account at all. The
same argument had been used to defend the course pur-
sued by Parliament in the matter of Wilkes and his
constituency. The Ministerial case, (as Burke wrote
in 1770,) was that the English had a very good govern-
ment, but were a very bad people ; that with a malig-
nant insanity they opposed wise measures expressly
designed to promote their peace and prosperity; and
that the disorders which convulsed the State had been
manufactured by a few sorry libellers and designing
politicians, without virtue, parts, or character. Very
perverse indeed, (so Burke admitted with melancholy
irony,) must be the disposition of that people among
whom such a disturbance could be excited by such
means. 44 We seem," he said, 44 to be driven to absolute
despair ; for we have no other materials to work upon
but those out of which God has been pleased to form
the inhabitants of this island." 1
1 This line of reasoning is developed in the opening paragraph of
Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents.
pt. 11.— vol. 1. c
18
THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
The inherent wickedness of the governed has been in
all ages a plea for misgovernment ; and the statement
c f that plea by such a pen as Burke's is its refutation.
The inhabitants of New England and of Old England
were made out of much the same materials ; and, the colo-
nists being what they were, if certain known steps were
taken, certain inevitable results were bound to follow.
The question to be determined at successive points of
the American controversy was in every case a clear and
simple issue. Whether Boston should be subjected to
a military occupation ; whether the tea-duty was to be
retained or removed ; whether the Port Bill was to be
passed, and the Charter of Massachusetts broken;
whether the petitions and remonstrances from the first
Congress were to be respectfully considered or con-
temptuously thrown aside ; — were problems demanding
nothing beyond good sense and good feeling for their
right solution. There would indeed have been some
shadow of palliation for the action of the Ministry and
of their followers if, at the time, they had been insuffi-
ciently forewarned what the consequences of that action
were sure to be. But, as it was, sagacious statesmen
in both houses of Parliament, — Lord Chatham and
Lord Camden, the Duke of Richmond and Lord Shel-
burne, Burke, Conway, and Dunning, — with pertinacity
and sincerity, and from the fullness of knowledge, never
wearied of pleading in favour of reason and moderation.
The same lesson was every second morning repeated to
the town by vigorous well-informed journalists whose
writings had a wide circulation. But the Ministerialists
could not be forced to read newspapers; and in the
Commons they took care to hear as little as possible
of that which did not meet their own views. The de-
vice of shouting down discussion, perfected by practice
during the heats of the Middlesex Election, was applied
unsparingly throughout the earlier American debates
to speakers who opposed the Government. It may well
be doubted whether it is the function of history to
find apologies for men who over and over again, at a
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A LAST C// A NCR FOR PEACE
19
very great crisis, adopted a wrong course in defiance
of the opinion strongly held, and fearlessly urged, by
many among the best and most far-seeing of their own
contemporaries.
One more chance for a peaceful solution of the dis-
pute between England and America now presented it-
self. The action of Congress in July 1 775 was directed
by a man the sincerity of whose desire to maintain the
connection with the mother-country has never been
questioned. John Dickinson of Pennsylvania, the au-
thor of the " Farmer's Letters," was a devoted subject
of the Crown, proud to enthusiasm of his British citizen-
ship. Already he had a difficult task in harmonising
loyalty to his sovereign with loyalty to the Colonial
cause. Samuel Adams, — acute, indefatigable, and
strong-willed to a fault, — had convinced himself that
the independence of America should be declared forth-
with, and was working by pen and voice, in public
debate and private conversation, to impress that convic-
tion upon his colleagues at Philadelphia. The news of
Bunker's Hill accentuated the opposition between the
two statesmen. Adams saw in that event a final indica-
tion that the controversy had been transferred to the
battle-field; and he was firmly persuaded that war could
not be waged to a successful result by people who be-
lieved, or even tried or pretended to believe, that they
still owed allegiance to the titular chief of their adver-
saries. Dickinson, on the other hand, regarded the
slaughter of the seventeenth of June as a foretaste of
the horrors which would signalise a protracted contest
between two sections of a brave and obstinate race. He
was ready to make great exertions, and large conces-
sions, in order to prevent that dire calamity; and his
love and admiration for the rulers of Great Britain in-
spired him with a confident anticipation that they would
not be so wanting in prudence and humanity as to reject
unconditionally the advances of the colonists. He urged
that the King should be approached with all those forms
20 THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
of respectful submission which in his own case were not
lip-worship ; and his advice prevailed. He drafted a peti-
tion beseeching that the royal authority might graciously
be interposed to assuage mutual fears and jealousies;
requesting His Majesty himself, from his own wisdom,
to direct the mode by which the applications of his faith-
ful colonists might be improved into a happy and per-
manent reconciliation ; and assuring him that they, on
their part, retained too tender a regard for the kingdom
from which they derived their origin to ask for such a
settlement as might in any manner be inconsistent with
her dignity and welfare. George the Third, as was well
known, would not take official cognisance of any docu-
ment issued on the authority of a body professing to
represent the united provinces of America. It was ac-
cordingly stated in a preamble that the petition ema-
nated from certain of His Majesty's subjects in various
colonies, (each of which was separately named,) who
had taken advantage of having met together as deputies
to a Congress in order to address His Majesty on behalf
of themselves and their fellow-countrymen.
The petition, adopted and signed on the eighth of
July, was entrusted for presentation to Richard Penn,
a grandson of William Penn by the second marriage.
That celebrated man had died in England; old, poor,
hardly used, and as unhappy as his equable and coura-
geous temperament, and his serene religious faith,
would allow him to be. The distresses and embarrass-
ments, which beset his later years, arose for the most
part from the peculiarities of his immense but unde-
fined position as the founder and proprietor of a state
not inferior in extent and resources to more than one
modern European kingdom. But after his death, in
the course of two generations, the influence of his
family in Pennsylvania became consolidated, and their
worldly fortunes revived. One or another of them,
when so minded, held the governorship of the prov-
ince ; and at all times they had to the full such power
and dignity as would be enjoyed by the members
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A LAST CHANCE FOR PEACE
21
of a royal house in a country the whole of which was,
or lately had been, Crown-land. Episcopalians of a
mild type, they very generally retained the confidence
and esteem of the Quakers, whose repugnance to war
and rebellion they personally had the best of reasons
for sharing. Their wealth was enormous ; and, — con-
sisting, as it did, of quit-rents, mining royalties, ferry-
rights, reserved lands, and all the other appurtenances
of territorial monopoly, — it was certain not to survive
a revolution. The placing a petition in such hands
was in itself an announcement that the petitioners
had the success of their prayer most earnestly at
heart.
Penn discharged his mission with alacrity. He sailed
at once ; the winds were favourable ; he arrived at
Bristol on the thirteenth of August, and was the next
day in London. But no minister would see him. A
week elapsed before the Secretary for the Colonies
consented to look at even a copy of the paper ; and it
was not until September had begun that Dartmouth
submitted it to the King. Three days afterwards Penn
was told that, as the address had not been received on
the throne, no answer would be given. But, in truth, a
very sufficient answer had already been made public.
On the twenty-third of August there appeared a Royal
Proclamation inviting all subjects of the realm to give
information against all persons in any manner or degree
aiding or abetting those who now were in open arms
and rebellion against the Government within any of
the Colonies of North America, in order to bring to
condign punishment the authors, perpetrators, and
abettors of such traitorous designs. 1
1 An American historian implies that the Proclamation of the twenty-
third of August was prepared in answer to the petition, a copy of which had
for forty-eight hours been in the hands of Ministers. But, writing on
August 1 8, the King mentions the Proclamation as already drawn up. The
world, however, which did not see behind the scenes, naturally supposed
that the Proclamation was expressly issued to preclude the hope of a
favourable reply to the petition, and thought that in any case the Gov-
ernment might at least have waited until they were in official possession
of what the Americans had to say.
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22
THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
In accordance with custom the Proclamation was
read at the Royal Exchange, at high noon. The
Corporation did not withhold the services of the officer
on whom the duty of reading fell. But he was sent
forth on foot, without the Mace, and alone ; so that, by
way of providing himself with at least one attendant, he
came accompanied by the common crier. The touch
of John Wilkes, then Lord Mayor, was easily recognised
in the arrangement of the ceremony. Its shabbiness
was much to the taste of the Londoners, who greeted
the last sentence of the manifesto with a hiss. When
such was the reception of the Proclamation in Cornhill
and Threadneedle Street, it was not likely to be wel-
comed in the State House of Philadelphia. The con-
sternation of Dickinson and his followers on hearing
themselves denounced as traitors was deep and lasting.
Sorely disappointed, Dickinson himself was not con-
verted, or even shaken, in his view of the relations
which should subsist between the Colonies and the
Crown. He struggled manfully to retain in their
allegiance both his native state, and the general
body of the Provinces. His efforts proved fruitless;
and during the progress of the controversy his popu-
larity among his countrymen, which had been very
precious to him, entirely disappeared. But, though
America rejected his advice, he still believed that she
had justice on her side in her original quarrel with the
British Parliament ; and he took service as a private
soldier in the ranks of the Continental army. Dickinson
had risked and lost much for the privilege of remaining
a subject ; but the royal master, for whom the sacrifice
was made, would not allow him to be anything but a rebel.
Lord Stanhope, — a fair and exact historian, and a
Tory who was proud of the name, — comments with grave
severity on the treatment accorded to the American
petition. Its courteous reception, he observes, might
have averted the further growth of civil strife, and once
more united together the two great branches of the
British race. Its rejection, on the contrary, though little
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A LAST CHANCE FOR PEACE
23
considered at the time in England, was never forgotten
in America ; and was repeatedly and successfully cm-
ployed to confirm waverers in their resistance to the
Crown, by reminding them that all the blood and all
the guilt of the war must be charged to British and not
to American counsels. 1
George the Third clearly perceived that in the sum-
mer of 1775 the critical period had come. He saw that
whatever policy was then adopted could not afterwards
be retraced, or even seriously modified ; and he laid
down in no ignoble language what in his view that
policy should be. " I am certain," (so he had written
in July,) "any other conduct but compelling obedience
would be ruinous and culpable ; therefore no considera-
tion could bring me to swerve from the present faith I
think myself in duty bound to follow." The King did
not attempt to deceive himself about the gravity of the
enterprise which he had undertaken. Foreseeing that
the struggle must be arduous, and might be long, he
resolved that preparations for the forthcoming campaign
should be taken strongly in hand from the first moment.
Side by side with military business, he effected an im-
portant change in the composition of his Ministry. He
was dissatisfied with some of his principal servants ; and
one of those servants was gravely dissatisfied with him.
The Duke of Grafton had long been uneasy. He con-
tinued to hold the Privy Seal because his sovereign urged
him; but he had never re-entered the Cabinet after he
quitted it in January 1770 in consequence of having
been over-ruled on the question of the tea duty. George
the Third, with genuine delicacy, expressed a wish that
the ex prime minister should still be kept informed on
all secret Government business; and Grafton exchanged
news freely with Lord Dartmouth, " the only one," he
said, "among the King's confidential servants who had
1 Lord Stanhope's History of England, chapter liii. John Jay, the
first Chief Justice of the United States, used to say that, until the second
petition of Congress in 1775 had been presented and ignored, he never
heard any American, of any lass or any description, express a wish for the
independence of the Colonies.
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THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
a true desire to see lenient means adopted towards the
Colonies." The Duke now learned that Mr. Penn had
come over from Philadelphia with a petition, and that
no notice was to be taken of it by the Ministry. The
effect produced on Grafton's mind is told at length in
his Autobiography. It was evident, (he said,) to all
considerate men that the connection of the two coun-
tries hung on the reversal of that unfortunate decision.
The day before the Petition was handed in he wrote to
Lord North a letter suggesting that, when the Session
opened, the Government should procure the intervention
of Parliament in favour of an attempt at pacification.
An Address might be moved in both Houses, praying
His Majesty to order his generals to inform the rebel
army that, in case the Colonies would depute persons
to state to Parliament their wishes and expectations, no
hostile steps would be taken on his part until the issue
of the negotiation should be known. So gracious an
offer, if accepted by Congress, might still be in time to
restore a good understanding. If it was declined, the
colonists would be obliged to confess that Great Britain
was reluctant, though not afraid, to fight ; and our own
people would respond to the demands of war with an
assured conscience, and an enthusiasm which at present
was not in existence. 1
Grafton's letter remained unanswered for seven weeks ;
and the reply, when at last it arrived, was unfavourable.
He obtained an audience, and told George the Third in
so many words that the Ministers, deluded themselves,
were deluding His Majesty. "The King," the Duke
said, " vouchsafed to debate the business much at large ;
and appeared to be astonished when I answered earnestly,
to his information that a large body of German troops
was to join our forces, that His Majesty would find too
late that twice that number would only increase the dis-
grace, and never effect his purpose." Having made his
protest in the Closet, he repeated it in the House of
Lords with quiet and solemn emphasis. " If my brother,
1 Grafton's Autobiography, chapter viii.
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A LAST CHANCE FOR PEACE
25
or my dearest friend," he said, " were to be affected by
the vote I mean to give this evening, I could not pos-
sibly resist the faithful discharge of my conscience and
my duty." The next day the Duke was summoned to
the Palace. On this occasion he was bidden to bring
the Privy Seal with him ; and, when the interview was
over, it remained on the King's table. George the Third
thanked North, (who held Grafton's views about Amer-
ica, but was not man enough to act on them,) for his
handsome conduct when compared with the "shameful
desertion " of others. The Crown had much to give ;
but shame and self-respect were matters outside the
range of its disposal. In early life, when Grafton him-
self was at the head of the Government, he had learned
by very cruel experience that there is no royal road to
honour.
Two out of three Secretaries of State were, in the
King's judgement, unequal to the requirements of the
situation. Lord Dartmouth was too weak, as certainly
he was too good, for the post which he held ; and Lord
Rochford, in troubled times, was unfit for any post what-
ever. Dartmouth was unwilling to be shifted. He made
difficulties, — not greater indeed than are ordinarily made
on such occasions by the members of a Cabinet which is
not very much afraid of its prime minister, — but suffi-
cient to distress his sovereign, who could not bear to
hurt him. At last he consented to accept the Privy
Seal, in an hour propitious to his reputation and his
happiness. Henceforward he had abundant leisure for
those religious and benevolent undertakings which
constituted his real vocation. His official duties were
much what he pleased to make them. The Cabinet
gladly turned over to him all the business for which he
had an inclination, and especially such matters as brought
the minister in charge of them into contact with a bishop.
When local opinion in Birmingham was divided on the
question of equipping the town with a licensed theatre,
Dartmouth sate in judgement on the case. After hear-
ing all that was to be said for and against the proposal,
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26
THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
— and the arguments, though not perhaps in his eyes,
were as comical as any farce that was likely to be repre-
sented on the boards, — he decided to throw the weight
of the Government into the scale opposed to the conces-
sion. That was the sternest act of coercion for which he
was thenceforward responsible. It was a very different
thing from making arrangements to invade, burn, and
devastate a land inhabited by people with whom he was
in as close sympathy as with his countrymen at home.
During the last five years of the war, (as far as the Par-
liamentary History records,) he never opened his lips on
the subject of America. His popularity in that country
revived. Even those colonists, who hated the rest of
the Cabinet, trusted and liked him ; and he, in return,
felt a pained and placid concern for their welfare, re-
gretting only that they could not view their own interests
in the same light as himself and his royal master. That
master he now saw only on his best side ; while George
the Third had always valued what was good in Dart-
mouth, if indeed there was anything except good about
him. When in the course of time the Government fell,
and the separation between monarch and minister could
no longer be averted, the King broke the news in a letter
honourable to them both. " I have ever esteemed Lord
Dartmouth, since I have thoroughly known him, in
another light than any of his companions in Ministry.
What days has it pleased the Almighty to place me in,
when Lord Dartmouth can be a man to be removed but
at his own request! But I cannot complain. I adore
the will of Providence, and will ever resign myself obedi-
ently to his will. My heart is too full to add more." 1
From Lord Rochford the King parted at once and
finally. The retiring minister did not go empty-handed.
His claim upon the Treasury, in George the Third's
estimation, was quite irrespective of the actual condition,
or the future prospects, of the national balances. Royal
gratitude was never sparing towards a public servant
who, at a pinch, had done his duty to the mind of his
1 The King to the Earl of Dartmouth; March 27, 17S2.
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A LAST CHANCE FOR PEACE
sovereign ; and that, in a marked degree, was the case
with Rochford. In January 1770 he had voted in the
Cabinet against Grafton, and in favour of maintaining
the tax on tea. Grafton now surrendered his place with
no compensation except a quiet conscience, which he
never again lost; but Rochford insisted on something
much more substantial being settled upon him for life.
" Though my finances," so George the Third wrote to
Lord North, "are in a very disgraceful situation, yet,
with the desire I have to make the situation you are in
happy, I cannot require one minute's time for considera-
tion, but most willingly consent to give Lord Rochford a
pension of 2500/. per annum." Rochford was grateful.
11 This morning," he wrote on the tenth of November to
the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, " I resigned the Seals :
not with my own choice, but with my hearty concord-
ance, as it contributes to an arrangement thought neces-
sary for the King's affairs. I have, however, obtained a
most honourable retreat; a very considerable pension
for my life, and a promise from the King that he will
confer the Garter upon me the first Chapter His Majesty
holds. I venture so far to trespass upon your friendship
as to beg your Lordship will give me a little sinecure
place of about fifty or sixty pounds a year for an old
servant that has lived with me thirty years. I have now
no way of providing for him but by keeping him myself,
which will be a great charge to me." " It is," (so he
explained to the Irish Secretary,) " for our old friend
my butler, who has poured you out many a glass of good
Burgundy." And thus Rochford fell soft, and his butler
likewise, who had so often helped his master's guests to
fall soft before. 1
One of the vacant offices was given to Lord Wey-
mouth, who had resigned a Secretaryship of State five
{rears before, for reasons which are still obscure. He
eft office in December 1770 during the difficulty which
had arisen with Spain about the Falkland Islands ; and
it was remarked at the time that he did not know how
1 Harcourt Papers, in the British Museum.
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THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
to make a peace, and did not wish to make a war. But
in 1775 the American war was already made; and the
King had no intention whatever of allowing his Secre-
taries of State to see whether they could make a peace.
The Bedfords, now dominant in the Cabinet, could not
be easy until they had Weymouth back among them.
He was a Bedford, endowed largely with the personal
and political attributes of the clan. When Weymouth
was quite young, George the Second had said of him
that he could not be a good kind of man, as he never
kept company with any woman, and loved nothing but
play and strong beer. He so far mended his ways as to
take to wine ; and he could converse over it brilliantly and
agreeably until that hour of the morning when the ban-
quet had lost all resemblance to a feast of reason. Ut-
terly ruined early in life, he was ill thought of even in
circles whose rule of conduct was easy beyond the verge
of laxity. To save him from his creditors, he was
appointed Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, and received the
money for his outfit ; but Ireland would not have him.
The first, and perhaps the most important, of Weymouth's
public services was to enable an English prime minister
to ascertain the low-water mark of character which
would qualify a nobleman for the occupation of Dublin
Castle. He was now forty-one years old, and not likely
to grow any worse. The King could endure Sandwich,
and might reasonably be expected to put up with
Weymouth, who at all events had one vice the less. In
the House of Lords he generally spoke well, and always
shortly. Those were his antecedents, and those were
his titles to public employment. Weymouth was a
wonderful personage to be added to a Government which
professed to entertain the hope of winning back into
loyalty all that was honest and respectable among the
population of New England.
The other in-coming minister was Lord George Ger-
maine. As a rising soldier, while he still was called Lord
George Sackville, he had seen hard service. His military
qualities had obtained high praise from two such judges
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A LAST CHANCE FOR PEACE
of valour as General Wolfe and the Duke of Cumberland.
He was shot in the breast at Fontenoy, having led his
regiment so far within the enemy's position that his
wound was dressed in Louis the Fifteenth's own tent.
In much later days a noted Whig duellist warmly ac-
knowledged that, in all the affairs in which he had been
engaged, he had never met anybody who behaved better
than Germaine. A man whose courage was conspicuous
at thirty, and at five-and-fifty, could never have been
anything but brave. It was under the influence, not of
personal fear, but of other unworthy motives, that he
made the mistake of his career at Minden. 1 When in
command of the cavalry during that battle he disobeyed
an order which, to Ligonier or Granby, would have been
more welcome than an offer of the Garter and ten thou-
sand a year for life. He kept the British dragoons
standing idle beside their horses while one after another
of Prince Ferdinand's aides-de-camp in vain urged him
to charge home and complete the victory which the
British infantry had won. His punishment was exem-
plary. He was dismissed the service. He was struck
off the Privy Council. He lost his numerous employ-
ments and rich endowments. At his own earnest request
he was granted a court-martial, but was informed that,
if sentenced to die, he would certainly be shot. He was
found guilty of disobedience in presence of the enemy,
and adjudged to be unfit to serve His Majesty in any
military capacity whatever. George the Second con-
firmed the sentence, and had it recorded in the order-
book of every regiment in the army, accompanied by a
warning that high birth, and great place, would not
1 " It is difficult to believe that a Sackville wanted common courage.
This Sackville fought duels with propriety ; in private life he was a surly,
domineering kind of fellow, and had no appearance of wanting spirit. It
is known, he did not love Duke Ferdinand ; far from it ! May not he have
been of peculiarly sour humour that morning, the luckless fool; sulky
against Ferdinand, and his 'saddling at one o'clock;' sulky against
himself, against the world and mankind ; and flabbily disinclined to heroic
practices for the moment?" Carlyle's Frederick the Crea.' ; Book XIX.
chapter iii.
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THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
shelter an offender from censures worse than death to
a mad who had any sense of honour. So vast was the
scandal, and so durable the memory of it, that it has
ever since been a sort of sinister protection to Germaine's
reputation. His connection with all those misfortunes
which befel our arms during the war of the American
Revolution is well nigh forgotten ; and he is remem-
bered in military history principally, and almost ex-
clusively, as the man who made "the great refusal"
on the plains at Minden. 1
1 Neither friend nor ill-wisher ever thought of Lord George Germaine
apart from the central event of his career. In August 1775 Gibbon was
writing to Holroyd on electioneering matters. Both of them knew Lord
George intimately in society, and acted with him in politics; and yet, twice
in the same letter, Gibbon referred to him under the nickname of " Minden."
The identity of the Secretary of State with the commander of Prince
Ferdinand's cavalry was sometimes mercifully concealed from people who
had not kept themselves abreast of recent changes in the peerage. A
Crown living in the neighbourhood of some Government powder-mills had
chanced to fall vacant. It was said that a sprightly young divine, who had
been selected to fill it, waited upon Lord George Germaine, and told him
that he was much obliged for the offer, but that he liked powder as little
as Lord George Sackville. The story may be found in the corner of con-
temporary magazines; but it bears the mark of having been manufactured
at Brooks's.
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CHAPTER II
THE HESSIANS. PROCEEDINGS IN PARLIAMENT
The effect which these appointments produced upon
public opinion may be estimated by the judgement
passed upon them by George Selwyn, who was an
easy man of the world, and in this particular case
the least harsh of critics. For he was a silent, obedient,
and, (so far as he had convictions,) a convinced supporter
of the Government, on whose continuance in office his
own sinecures depended. ** This new acquisition in each
House," he wrote, " will have so many gross things said
to them that I do not know what may follow from it.
The talent of public speaking bears certainly a great
price in this country ; and the strongest proof of it is
that Ministers will move heaven and earth to get one
of these glib orators on their side, in spite of the most
odious or despicable character whatever." 1 When the
posts were allotted, George the Third did not forget the
past history of his most recent ministerial recruit. " Lord
George Germaine," he wrote to North, " cannot treat with
the Continent" Germaine, accordingly, had the colonies;
Lord Rochford was replaced in the Southern Department,
and entrusted with the diplomatic relations between Great
Britain, and France and Spain ; while Lord Suffolk was
retained in the Northern Department, where business was
done with Germany.
That business was now of a very delicate and special
1 Letter from Selwyn to Lord Carlisle : Historical Manuscripts Com-
mission; Fifteenth Report, Appendix, Part VI. The date suggested in the
volume is February 1776: but internal evidence clearly indicates that the
letter was written on the second of November, 1775.
31
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THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
nature, and could not be entrusted to a personage whose
name, when that name was Lord George Sackville, had
been a byword in German military circles. A civil war
had already broken out ; foreign wars were only too sure
to supervene ; and our armaments had been allowed to
dwindle until the means of offence and defence were al-
most entirely wanting. The bare facts and dates, with-
out epithet or comment, sufficiently characterise the
improvidence of the Ministry. When the Army and
Navy Estimates were moved in December 1774, the
seamen were reduced by four thousand, and the land
forces were fixed at a number below eighteen thousand
effective men. So it came to pass that in August 1775,
before active operations had continued for a quarter of
a year, the kingdom at home had been denuded of all
but a few weak and scattered regiments ; and our only
considerable organised body of troops was shut up in
Boston. It was not the King's fault. His Majesty had
long contended that the Peace establishment, in both the
services, was far too low. Early in the summer of 1775
he had urged, and at last had insisted, that exceptional
efforts should be made to obtain a supply of men, and
that recourse should be had to unusual sources. The
example of Chatham in the Seven Years' War was re-
membered and imitated ; and the clansmen of the Scot-
tish Highlands were enlisted to fight in a cause that
certainly was not Chatham's.
The North of Scotland was a more promising recruit-
ing-ground than ever ; for the full effect was now being
felt of the process by which Highland chiefs, when their
military power had been broken, converted themselves
from feudal superiors into rack-renting landlords. After
the rebellion of 1745 had been suppressed the British Gov-
ernment neglected a unique opportunity. Wise and hu-
mane statesmen, of our famous Anglo-Indian type, would
have seized the occasion for framing a just and compre-
hensive land-settlement, under which all classes should
receive their due. But, as it was, the H ighlands were aban-
doned to the mercy of the Court of Session at Edinburgh,
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THE HESSIANS
33
which recognised the Chief as sole and absolute pro-
prietor of the entire territory occupied by the clan. In
1773, when Doctor Johnson was travelling through the
Hebrides, he had watched with grave disapproval the
consequences entailed upon the inhabitants of those
regions by that fatal and one-sided policy. The chief-
tains, (so Johnson learned,) had flattered themselves
with golden dreams of much higher rents than could
reasonably be paid. 1 Those clansmen who were reck-
less and improvident bid against each other in order to
secure farms ; while the industrious and the enterprising,
who likewise were the most prudent, surrendered their
old homes, and sought a career beyond the seas. The
tacksmen, the flower of the tribe for the purposes both
of peace and war, had been the hardest hit by the new
system. Great numbers of them had emigrated to the
colonies ; many others were on the eve of going ; and
they were accompanied on their voyage by the most
stout-hearted of their humbler neighbours, whose fathers
their fathers had so often led into battle. Johnson in-
dignantly exclaimed that a nobleman of France would
never be permitted to force the French King's subjects
out of the country. If these rapacious chieftains, (he
declared,) resided in Normandy or Brittany, they would
be admonished by a letter of the sort which, while the
Bastille stood, their monarch was in the habit of send-
ing to those who incurred his displeasure. 2 And so it
came about that when, in the autumn and winter of
1 775, troops were needed to suppress rebellion in the
colonies, the best fighting men of Argyllshire and In-
1 Conversation between Doctor Johnson and Donald M'Queen on the
thirteenth of September, 1773.
2 A hundred and thirteen years were still to elapse before the British
Government, by methods more constitutional than a lettre de cachet, took
effective measures for restoring security and contentment to the agricultural
population of the Highlands. The Act of 1886, which gave the Crofter
an assured tenure upon payment of an equitable rent, was not seriously
opposed either in the House of Commons or the House of Lords. This
unanimity of Parliament, — always soft-hearted where the Highlander is
in fjuestion, — conferred singular force and authority upon a healing measure
which undid all that it still was practicable to undo of the wrongs of ages.
it. 11.— vol. I. D
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THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
verness-shire eagerly hailed the chance of winning by
their swords a settlement in America more secure than
that which their progenitors had held, by the tenure of
the sword, in the valleys of their native Scotland.
King George's call for soldiers met with a less lively
response in other parts of his dominions. " Beating
orders," as the phrase then ran, were sent to Ireland ;
and the poorer Catholics of Connaught and Munster
were invited into the ranks. But it was a bad time for
tempting Irish farmers away from their cabins, which
were overflowing with unwonted plenty. The Dublin
Government reported in October that agriculturists had
never experienced so prosperous a year. " Corn of all
kinds," wrote Lord Harcourt, " and potatoes, the chief
food of the people, are a drug. They are now sold in
the North for fourpence a hundred-weight. They were
never known at so cheap a rate before." 1 Recruiting
moved slowly in Ireland, and almost imperceptibly in
England, where hardly any enthusiasm for the war
existed among the classes from which soldiers were
drawn. That enthusiasm was fainter in no one than
in the man who stood at the summit of military adminis-
tration. Lord Barrington disliked the measures adopted
to procure recruits, and disbelieved in their efficacy.
The King attributed the slackness and despondency
which prevailed at the War Office to the right cause.
That department, left to itself, was not likely to pro-
duce shining results when there was a minister at the
head of the Army who disapproved of having a war at
all, and thought that, if hostilities could not be avoided,
they should be carried on exclusively by sea. 2 But the
master's vigour and high courage reinforced the deficien-
cies of the servant. George the Third had all the family
love of military details; he never spared himself or his
carriage-horses ; he was always on the spot, or within
a few miles of it ; and, if not actually in St. James's,
he was ready at an hour's notice to come up from Kew,
1 Harcourt Papers.
8 The King to North ; Kew, August 26, 1775.
THE HESSIANS
35
or, at furthest, from Windsor. Week after week, and
year by year, Lord Barrington was complaining ; plead-
ing weak health and a sore conscience ; and reminding
the King that his resignation had been sent in months
before, and that no notice had been taken of it. But
all his protests were unheeded by his inexorable sov-
ereign, who kept him in office against his will, and did
very much the most important part of his work for
him.
A pressing concern of the Ministry was to make
arrangements by which England's wealth might be
used to hire foreigners for the purpose of fighting
battles which Englishmen were not keen to fight them-
selves. Sir Robert Gunning, our Envoy Extraordinary
to Russia, was personally a favourite with the Empress ;
and Catherine had conveyed to him an expression of
her regret for the difficulties in which his Government
was plunged. Gunning followed up what he assumed
to be his advantage, and persuaded himself and his
employers that twenty thousand disciplined Russian
infantry, fully equipped, would sail for Canada as soon
as the Baltic was open in the spring of the coming
year. They were to serve, not as auxiliaries, but as a
component part of the British army under the com-
mand of a British general. Burke, who had long con-
templated American freedom and prosperity with a
sense of personal satisfaction, was shocked by the gro-
tesque proposal. " I am on thorns " : he wrote. " I
cannot, at my ease, see Russian barbarism let loose to
waste the most beautiful object that ever appeared upon
this globe." Gibbon, a cheerful cynic, familiarised by
his studies of the Roman decadence with the idea of
paying outlandish tribes to defend a civilised empire,
took the matter more lightly. "When the Russians
arrive," so he asked his friend Mr. Holroyd, "if they
refresh themselves in England or Ireland, will you go
to see their camp ? We, have great hopes of getting
a body of these barbarians. In consequence of some
very plain advances, George with his own hand wrote
D2
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THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
a very polite epistle to sister Kitty, requesting her
friendly assistance." But other potentates besides
George the Third were getting letters written, and
advice whispered, to the same august quarter. The
story of the communications which were passing be-
tween England and Russia soon became the common
property of every Chancery in Europe; and still less
was it a secret that the British Government had run
short of soldiers. Lord Barrington with his own mouth
had informed Monsieur de Guines, the French Ambas-
sador at St. James's, that England must take the field
with three separate armies, marching respectively from
New York, Boston, and Canada ; that those armies
would between them demand not less than forty to
fifty thousand men ; and that the country itself, at the
very outside, could not produce an active force of more
than eighteen thousand rank and file. 1
The Russian court was besieged by warnings and
expostulations from the capital of every country which
feared, or hated, or envied Britain. France was earnest
and active, and Spain also : but the most effective and
dexterous opposition came from Potsdam. Harris, our
minister at Berlin, informed Lord Suffolk that the
Empress of Russia, from the very first moment of the
negotiations, had taken the King of Prussia into her
confidence. Those negotiations, (it was added,) had
been wrecked, not by official diplomacy, but through
very influential agents indeed, — of the sort, it may be
presumed, who during Catherine's widowhood were
seldom wanting at St. Petersburg, — whom Frederic the
Great had found means to secure to his own interests. 2
In September 1775 Catherine, speaking, whether she
was so or not, like a true friend of England, adjured
Gunning to see that his royal master settled the dispute
with America by peaceful methods. " You know," she
1 Histoirt de la Participation de la France a r etablissement des £tah
Uttis de rAmcrique; par Henri Doniol. Tome Premier; Annexes du
chapitre vi.
* Decipher of Letter from Harris to Lord Suffolk, of December 1775.
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THE HESSIANS
37
said, " that my situation has been full as embarrassing ;
and, believe me, I did not rest my assurance of success
upon one mode of action. There are moments when
we must not be too rigorous." It was curious that such
doctrines should be preached to a constitutional King
of England by the autocrat of Russia. The wise coun-
sel was neglected ; and some weeks afterwards Cather-
ine gave her final answer in a letter flavoured by a
sublime impertinence which might have been inspired
by Frederic himself. There was, the Empress con-
tended, an impropriety in employing her troops in
another hemisphere, at the disposal of a foreign Gov-
ernment, and at a distance removed from all corre-
spondence with their own sovereign. Besides, (so she
assured the King of England,) she had not only her
own dignity to consider, but that of His Majesty also.
It would be an ill compliment from her to him that she
should consent to a course of action implying that he
was one of those monarchs who could not put down
their own rebellions. The King took the affront calmly,
like the gentleman that he was. " The letter of the
Empress," he wrote to his prime minister, " is a clear
refusal, and not in so genteel a manner as I should have
thought might have been expected from her. She has
not had the civility to answer in her own hand, and
has thrown out some expressions that may be civil to a
Russian ear, but certainly not to more civilised ones."
Germany remained ; — the fruitful parent of strong
men who had not yet been taught to reserve them-
selves for occasions when they would be wanted to fight
in defence of Germany's native interests. It required
the terrible experiences of nearly forty more years
before the Fatherland learned that lesson; and in 1775
the smaller states were still recruiting-grounds for every
ambitious ruler who had a design on the territory of his
neighbour, and for every royal martinet who liked to
see tall and sturdy Protestants in the front line of his
show regiments. George the Third had a claim of loy-
alty over one section of the German people. As Elector
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THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
of Hanover he made to the King of England what he
himself described as a loan of five battalions, who were
sent to garrison Gibraltar and Minorca, and release an
equivalent number of British troops for service in
America. Our country, as always, did things hand-
somely ; and Hanover was no loser by the transaction.
The whole force received British pay, which was on a
much more generous scale than was fingered by the
inmates of any barrack in Germany. The opportunity
was taken of getting the British taxpayer to provide
all ranks with a complete outfit, of which the officers
in particular stood woefully in need; and a British
Colonel, who knew something of the life on board a
transport, was told off for the duty of fortifying their
minds against the terrors of the voyage ; because, as
the King remarked, though brave on shore, Continental
forces feared the sea. 1
Over and above the assistance which he drew from
the regular military establishment of his hereditary
dominions, George the Third took measures for collect-
ing by voluntary enlistment a body of foreign troops
for the service of the British Crown. Such a force, in
the eighteenth century, was composed of very different
materials from that King's Foreign Legion which took
its share in the labours and glories of the Peninsula and
of Waterloo. The soldiers of Baron Ompteda, who
fought with intelligence and devotion for the common
cause of Germany and of England, rivalled in courage
the soldiers of Hill and Picton, and maintained before
the eyes of their British comrades a valuable example
of discipline and personal conduct. But it was other-
wise at the period of the American rebellion. The
Continental system of enlistment, which passed finally
away during the wars of the French Revolution, had
spread misery and corruption far and wide throughout
the humbler classes during the two generations which
preceded its extinction. The baleful results of its influ-
ence on army morals was analogous to the deterioration
1 The King to North; Kew, August I and 4, 1775.
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THE HESSIANS
39
of civil society by the institution of slave labour. In
most cases the agents of the system were debauched
and fraudulent, and not seldom infamous. The raco-
/curs, which was the name by which those agents were
called and loathed, pervaded Northern Europe in vari-
ous disguises, scraping acquaintance with likely lads ;
entrapping them across the frontier on false pretences ;
stupefying them with drugged liquor, or securing their
persons by methods of hateful violence. Sometimes
these worthies appeared in their proper dress and their
true character, strutting in front of a tent at fair or
market, with hat cocked and sword trailing, and the
general air of a bully with whom the world was going
well. They would harangue the peasants and appren-
tices on the charms of colonial service, in regions where
oranges and bananas and pomegranates might be had
for the picking, and gold or diamonds for the stooping ;
and they warned their hearers to beware of the preju-
dices which parents and relatives entertained against
the only career in which a young fellow of spirit was
sure to acquire a fortune.
Among the dupes whom they enticed and captured
there were decent quiet men who made the best of their
wretched lot, though they never became reconciled to
it ; and in war-time the more wayward and turbulent
natures found congenial excitement in the hazards of a
campaign, and the hopes of plunder and promotion.
But the greater number sank into moral ruin, and be-
came worthless citizens, and dishonest and disreputable
soldiers. Always, and especially during a long peace,
Europe swarmed with a nomad population of merce-
naries. The tramps and vagrants of military life, they
would serve one month in Turin, and another at Munich,
and the next at Stuttgart; taking to the fields at the
first opportunity which ofFered itself as soon as they
had secured a bounty. They played this game in
France, in Austria, in Holland, and, (much more cau-
tiously, and only as a desperate resource,) in Prussia. 1
1 Some German princes had a wonderful eye for an old soldier. Duke
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THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
Whatever garrison town might be their temporary domi-
cile, they were everywhere watched like convicts, and
punished with frightful severity. Each in his time had
ridden the wooden horse, with a couple of muskets
strapped to either foot ; or had lain in a mouldy dun-
geon, or dragged a cannon-ball at his ankle on the ram-
parts, for years together; or had run the gauntlet of a
battalion armed with switches as far down the line as
he could stagger before he fainted. Without honour,
without patriotism, they were thieves and drunkards;
seducers in time of peace, and something much worse
when during an invasion they had a village or farm-
house at their mercy. Hardly able, some of them, to
name a country where they could ever make a home,
and settle down to a trade, without the almost certain
prospect of being shot as deserters, they lived for the
passing moment, intent only on misusing it in some
manner agreeable to themselves.
George the Third was German enough thoroughly
to understand the system, and Englishman enough to
be somewhat ashamed of being directly mixed up with
it. His necessities obliged him to have recourse to
Continental enlistments; but the worst abuses which
were connected with it he was sincerely desirous to
avoid. He sent orders to Hanover to raise four thou-
sand men, and named two garrisons where the recruits
should be closely kept. Hut he absolutely and re-
peatedly declined to bribe and stimulate any profes-
sional recruiter by the offer of a Commission under his
own hand and in his own army. "The only idea these
Germans ought to adopt," he wrote, " is the being con-
tractors for raising recruits, and fixing the price they
will deliver them at Hamburgh, Rotterdam, and any
other port they may propose." Farther, and lower,
than this he would not go. " The giving commissions
Charles of Wurtembcrg, who flourished during the American war, made
it a standing rule that any traveller, with the look of a deserter, should be
brought into his presence and offered the choice between enlistment or
imprisonment for life.
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THE HESSIANS
41
to officers, or any other of the proposals that have been
made, I can by no means consent to, for they in plain
English are turning me into a kidnapper, which I can-
not think a very honourable occupation." 1
The laws of Germany, as the King admitted, did not
allow him to extend his operations outside the confines
of Hanover. The bishop who was Prince of Liege, and
the archbishop who was Elector of Cologne, allowed him
to establish recruiting centres within their respective
territories ; but the lay statesmen of the Court at Vienna
took another view of German honour and German obli-
gations. They wrote to the Free Cities that Great
Britain had no more connection with the empire than
Russia or Spain, neither of which powers was per-
mitted to recruit within its limits. Hampered by that
Constitutional difficulty, as well as by his own scruples,
George the Third fell back upon a project of hiring
ready-made battalions wholesale from needy, or, (if such
could be discovered,) friendly and sympathetic foreign
powers. The army of Holland contained a fine brigade
whose officers were Scotch by descent, although the rank
and file were no longer drawn from Scotland, as had
been the case until the middle of the century. Our
ambassador was instructed to request that this body of
troops should be transferred from the service of the
Netherlands to the service of Great Britain. But in
Holland such an application could not be granted
before it had been openly examined and discussed.
When the matter came on for debate it was opposed
on the practical ground that a commercial state should
never, except from necessity, become involved in any
quarrel; and by the historical argument that the Dutch,
who owed their national existence to what in its day
had been termed a rebellion, should be chary of helping
to subdue a people who possibly were as brave, and as
ardent for liberty, as their own forefathers. The States
General agreed to send the Scotch brigade across to
England on condition that it should not be employed
1 King to North ; Kew, August 26, and November 14, 1775.
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THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
outside Europe. That reply, courteous in form, was
intended as a refusal by the Hague ; and as such it was
construed at Whitehall.
The British Government thenceforward directed its
efforts to more promising quarters. Charles, Duke of
Brunswick, in the course of a long reign had spent,
sometimes on objects of very dubious morality, all that
he could extract from his own people, and all that he
could induce capitalists in other countries to lend him.
His family already knew the feel of English money.
The Hereditary Prince, who had recently been asso-
ciated with his father in the administration of the
Duchy, had married Augusta, a sister of George the
Third ; had received with her an enormous dowry ;
and had given her very little happiness indeed in return
for it. The reigning house of Brunswick now, for the
second time, struck a hard bargain with the King of
England. They engaged to provide him four thousand
infantry and three hundred dismounted dragoons. As
long as the force received our pay, the Duke of Bruns-
wick was to get, for his own share, fifteen thousand
pounds a year from the English Treasury; and that
subsidy was not only to be continued, but was actually to
be doubled, during the two years succeeding the return
of the said troops into His Serene Highness's dominions.
General Riedesel, who commanded the contingent, was
a man of honour and prowess. The dragoons, and two
of the battalions, belonged to the regular Ducal army,
which the Hereditary Prince kept in a state of high
efficiency. But these choice articles were only, so to
speak, the upper layer in the consignment of the goods
which ultimately were delivered. In order to make up
the full tale of men, the Brunswick authorities put in
force the utmost rigours of conscription. The product
of their industry was not admirable to a good military
eye. Colonel Harcourt was an excellent officer, who
subsequently rose to great commands ; and who, as an
inmate of George the Third's household, was destined
for many years together to enjoy and deserve the inti-
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THE HESSIANS
43
mate confidence of his sovereign. " The Brunswickers,"
so Harcourt reported, " arrived at Portsmouth a few
days before, a sad sample of what is to be expected ;
no intermediate age between grandfathers and grand-
children; with coaches and every other impediment
for their officers, and without a necessary for their
men. The generals marched, or rather reeled, off the
parade." 1 This account was afterwards confirmed by
an observer who, for his misfortune, had a longer and
closer acquaintance than Harcourt with the worse
elements among our German auxiliaries. An English
officer, one of the captives of Saratoga, complained that
several of the Brunswick regiments in Burgoyne's army
were utterly unfit for warfare. The reigning Duke had
forced into the ranks all his subjects who at any time
had been soldiers ; and had obliged old officers to leave
their retirement, and take service once more, on pain, if
they refused, of forfeiting their half-pay. ** Only pic-
ture to your imagination," this gentleman exclaimed,
" ensigns of forty and fifty commanding troops not much
younger, and judge how proper they are for an active
and vigorous campaign in the thick woods of America." 2
The hope of gain disturbed the equanimity of all
Serene Highnesses, between the Elbe, the Danube, and
the Rhine, who owned a guard-room and a drill-yard.
To use Burke's unsavoury, but most expressive, meta-
phor, they snuffed the cadaverous taint of lucrative
war ; and the sky above the British Treasury was soon
alive with royal vultures. The Prince of the little state
of Waldeck wrote off at once to offer six hundred men
who, like their ruler, demanded nothing better than to
sacrifice themselves for His British Majesty. The sacri-
fice made by the Prince himself was to receive five
thousand pounds sterling for every year that the wood-
cutters and charcoal-burners of Waldeck were shooting,
1 Harcourt Papers : Letter of the Hon. Colonel William Harcourt, of
April 3, 1776.
* Travels through the Interior Parts of America, in a Series of Letters
by an Officer. London, 1791.
44
THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
and being shot by, the lumberers of Maine and Con-
necticut. The spontaneous advances of one potentate
were rejected on the ground that his troops were among
the worst in Germany. Another, who had just wits
enough to keep up sixteen recruiting stations on the
territory of his neighbours, pressed a battalion on the
acceptance of George the Third in a letter so crazy that
it could not be translated into rational English. London
society correctly analysed the motive which prompted
such an outburst of warlike zeal among the princes of
the Empire. 44 The civil discord between the parent
country and its enraged colonies boils over with inex-
pressible violence; whilst the administration, too late,
are now preparing to send out a most formidable force.
Environed with incendiaries, and accounting all helps as
scarce sufficient to quench the conflagration,
To Hesse, Brunswick, Hanover they run.
'Oh ! cross the Atlantic every mother's son;
Or that milch cow, Britannia, is undone.' " 1
So one man of fashion wrote to another in London;
and the proud and fiery aristocracy, which held high
debate in the Dublin parliament, was more outspoken
still. Four thousand British troops had been shipped
for America from Ireland ; and Lord North designed
to fill their place with an equal number of foreign
Protestants. But Ireland was the very last country in
the world which needed to import fighting Protestants ;
and so the prime minister learned to his cost before the
war had ended. The Lord Lieutenant at once declared
that such a proposition would not bear discussion in
either Chamber. 44 1 say it," Lord Harcourt wrote,
" with concern and shame, that I know no one of those
who have been called the ancient and confidential ser-
vants of the Crown whom I should dare to trust in
such an exigency without a risk of having the measure
defeated." 2
»Sir Charles Wintringham to Captain Monk ; Dover Street, March 25,
1776.
2 Lord Harcourt to Lord North; October 17, 1775.
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THE HESSIANS
45
There was one German ruler whose willingness to
lend his troops was more important than that of any, or
indeed of all, of the others. The Hessian army, which,
when engaged in Continental war, exceeded in strength
the British army on a peace footing, was strictly disci-
plined and exceedingly formidable. It was raised by
conscription from a people docile to authority, strong in
body, with hardy habits, and of a courageous nature.
The Landgrave of Hesse now held the call of the mili-
tary market. He had a large stock of wares, of undeni-
able quality, manufactured and in store; and he used
his advantage shrewdly. He agreed to place at the dis-
posal of George the Third twelve thousand foot soldiers,
and thirty-two pieces of cannon. The details of the
treaty were minutely contested ; and, at every stage of
the discussions, Cassel never failed to get the better of
London. Point after point, each of them involving a
difference of hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of
crowns, was settled in favour of Hesse ; but the master-
stroke was the arrangement of the sum which was con-
tributed over and above the pay and expenses of the
troops. The German negotiators insisted that Great
Britain should promise a double subsidy of a hundred
and ten thousand pounds a year, which went into the
coffers of the Hessian Government as so much clear
profit That subsidy was to run for a complete twelve-
month after His Britannic Majesty had given notice to
the Landgrave that payment was to cease ; which notice
was not to be given until the contingent had returned
from America, 11 and had actually arrived in the domin-
ions of the said prince, namely in Hesse, properly so
called." 1
The magnitude of the transaction, and the one-sided
character of the bargain, impressed public imagination
to the exclusion of all besides ; and so it came to pass
that German mercenaries in the American war, then, and
1 Translation of the Treaty between His Majesty and the Landgrave of
Hesse Cassel : signed at Cassel, the thirteenth of January, 1776. Parlia-
mentary History, Vol. XVIII., page 1160.
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46
THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
ever since, were familiarly known as Hessians. The
whole force did not consist of made and trained soldiers.
The Landgrave could not afford to draw upon his regu-
lar army for so large a detachment ; and the unhappy
country was bled to the quick by an unsparing and
special conscription. To escape impressment many
Hessians fled to Hanover; and King George was re-
quested to turn back the fugitives from his frontier, and
to assist the Landgrave to fulfil his engagements with
Great Britain. One in every four of the able-bodied
men in Hesse was sooner or later shipped off to fight,
at a distance of a thousand leagues from his home, in a
quarrel about which he knew very little, and cared even
less. It has been calculated that a compulsory levy,
enforced upon England and Wales with the like sever-
ity, would have produced an army of four hundred
thousand men. 1 Even so, the ranks were not filled up ;
and the Landgrave had recourse to voluntary enlistment,
as it then was practised in Germany. Side by side with
Hessian peasants and artisans, there marched adven-
turers from every country in Europe. Some regiments,
which were well manned and perfectly drilled, wanted
nothing except a belief in their cause to make them as
good as the best; but others were below mediocrity,
and almost all of them contained a proportion of bad
materials. In the license of a foraging party, and in
the stress of battle, there was greater variety of be-
haviour among the auxiliaries than between one English
regiment and another. Certain German battalions were
the weakest links in the chain which was to bind Amer-
ica ; as was proved at Trenton and at Bennington, on
two occasions when the British expectations of a success-
ful issue to the war appeared to be on the very eve of
fulfilment.
Everything comes to a reputation which waits; and
the Landgrave of Hesse has had his turn of being
whitewashed by history. He has of recent years been
made the subject of an elaborate and ingenious apology
1 Bancroft^ History: Part III., chapter 57.
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THE HESSIANS
47
from the point of view of Hessian, as opposed to Prus-
sian and German, patriotism. 1 It is argued that he
took part in the American war in order to assert the
title of his State to rank among the military powers of
the world ; and his conduct has been compared to that
of Count Cavour, when Sardinians were despatched to
the Crimea as the allies of France and England. The
same statesmanlike wisdom, it is asserted, was shown
at Cassel in 1775 and at Turin in 1855. But the Cri-
mean policy of the great Italian was adopted as a first
step towards the liberation and consolidation of Italy ;
whereas the Landgrave of Hesse cannot be credited
with any aspiration to promote either the freedom or
the unity of Germany. We are told, in a passage not
destitute of pathos, how the Elector " never ceased to
mourn over the long absence of his army, his dear sub-
jects ; " and how anxiety, and years of quiet grief,
weighed on his noble heart, so that, a few months after
the return of the last of his soldiers, he died suddenly,
and all too soon for the love of the people whom he
governed. The lapse of time places bounds to the
retrospective operation of human sympathy; and our
generation has no tears to spare for the circumstance
that Frederic the Second of Hesse expired before re-
ceiving from London the last instalment of his conso-
lation-money.
A more solid argument in favour of the Elector of
Hesse was the effect of British munificence upon the
finances of the Electorate, and upon the private budgets
of the officers and soldiers of the Contingent. The
advocate and panegyrist of the Landgrave assures us
that the men were better paid, and their commanders
much better paid, than the corresponding ranks of the
English establishment. There never, (he says,) was an
army so well off as the Hessians who served in America.
A married subaltern could support his family in Ger-
* Summary and statement of a pamphlet published in Cassel in 1879,
communicated by Joseph G. Rosengarten to the Pennsylvania Magazine
of History and Biography : July 1 899.
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48
THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
many, while he himself lived well in the colonies : and
the captains, and those above them, laid by money fast.
It was a common thing for colonels to have from six
thousand, to thirteen thousand, dollars standing to their
credit. The subjects of the Elector, who remained at
home, had their share in this unparalleled prosperity.
The Landgrave raised his country from poverty and
squalor by the improvement of his capital and of the
neighbouring palace ; by roads, parks, museums, semi-
naries, hospitals, universities, libraries, opera house, and
chapel. When he came to the throne, the Hessian
Treasury owed two and a half millions of dollars.
When he died, it was twelve and a half millions to the
good. The source of all this beneficent expenditure,
and of all these savings, "was of course the English
subsidy ; " — and, (it might have been added,) an indefi-
nite prolongation of the misery and suffering which
was inflicted upon America. Whatever the argument
is worth, it is a poor defence when addressed to an
Englishman whose income-tax, on account of those old
subsidies, is to this day higher by a perceptible fraction
of a penny. Nor is it an argument of much value in
the estimation of a German patriot. Men do not ap-
prove conduct which they would scorn to imitate ; and,
since the days of Blucher, and Stein, and Korner, no
true German would so much as entertain the idea of
trafficking in German valour. The best of the rulers
who shared in the profits of that unworthy commerce
had reason, in the course of events, bitterly to repent it.
The Hereditary Prince of Brunswick was a valiant war-
rior ; but he died the most unhappy of generals. Foiled
at Valmy by the enthusiasm of the young French re-
public, — and utterly ruined, with all that he held dear,
on the fatal day of Auerstadt and Jena, — he was
heavily punished for having helped to pervert and en-
feeble the national spirit of Germany by selling her
sons into the armies of the foreigner.
Information soon reached the colonists that a scheme
was on foot for effecting their subjugation by means of
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THE HESSIANS
49
a body of troops who did not speak their language, and
who came from countries where the idea of liberty, as
Anglo-Saxons understood it, was totally unknown. The
tidings were everywhere received with surprise, indig-
nation, and cruel anxiety. Those feelings were strong-
est in the quiet, well-ordered homesteads of the settled
districts which, ever since the red man had retreated
westwards, had been exempt from the terror of rapine,
and conflagration, and outrage. It was indeed a griev-
ous prospect for farmers who lived along the Hudson
River, or to the east of the Delaware. The German
officers, and a great majority of their men, might be re-
spectable and law-abiding, in so far as military law was
any protection to the inhabitants of a rural district
which had been proclaimed rebellious ; but a consider-
able percentage of the rank and file in some of the
regiments was composed of refuse from all the barrack-
rooms in Europe. The near future proved only too
well that the apprehensions entertained by dwellers in
the sea-board provinces were not exaggerated. A threat-
ened invasion by alien mercenaries affected Americans
not only as householders who trembled for their roof-
trees, their orchards, and for the welfare and honour
of their families. As citizens, also, and as politicians,
they warmly resented the interference of foreigners in
a national quarrel. Both in America and Great Britain,
the struggle was regarded as a civil war ; and such a
war, odious under many aspects, has at any rate one
thing in its favour. If honestly fought out, it affords
a rough, but not inadequate, test of the proportions in
which the public opinion of the nation concerned is
divided on one side of a question or the other. It was
already manifest that England was lukewarm ; native
Englishmen came but slowly forward to support in arms
the cause of the Ministers ; and for those Ministers to
tempt Germany into the ring by preposterously lavish
offers of English treasure was to play the game unfairly.
Such was the view held by the colonists in 1775; and
that view has ever since been taken by our own his-
PT. II. — VOL. I. E
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THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
torians. " The conduct of England," (so Mr. Lecky
writes,) " in hiring German mercenaries to subdue the
essentially English population beyond the Atlantic,
made reconciliation hopeless, and the Declaration of
Independence inevitable. It was idle for the Ameri-
cans to have any further scruple about calling in for-
eigners to assist them when England had herself set
the example." 1
*
So speaks the voice of posterity ; but even then Lord
North and his colleagues had a foretaste of the condem-
nation which was ultimately in store for them. In Feb-
ruary 1776 the treaties with Brunswick and Hesse were
communicated to Parliament. On the fifth of March
the House of Peers debated a proposal to countermand
the German troops, and suspend hostilities in America.
The question was moved by the Duke of Richmond, a
fiery and haughty nobleman, and a gallant soldier who
had distinguished himself at Minden ; though indeed
that circumstance was not now a passport to the favour
of the Court. The Duke, setting scornfully aside the
charge that he was giving information to a probable
enemy, spoke openly about the undefended condition of
the kingdom, which he affirmed to be so notorious that
nothing remained to be concealed. He computed our
home force at seven thousand men; and when the
metropolis, and the three great arsenals of Plymouth,
Portsmouth, and Chatham, had been provided with the
ridiculously insufficient garrison of a thousand apiece,
only two very weak brigades would be left to meet an
invader in the field. Those were the circumstances
under which three out of every four of our regiments
were despatched across the Atlantic to conquer America ;
with the prospect, if ever the conquest was effected, of
remaining there as an army of occupation and repression
until the end of time. But, even so, all the troops who
could be scraped together from every corner of Great
Britain and Ireland proved not enough for the task ; and
1 A History of England in the Eighteenth Century: chapter 12.
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PROCEEDINGS IN PARLIAMENT 5 1
their efforts were to be seconded by a host of merce-
naries, hired on terms so profuse as to humiliate our
nation in the eyes of Europe, and to excite the jealousy
of our own less favoured military people. It was all
very well, (Richmond argued,) for the ministers to assert
that they had the constituencies with them. The chief
support of their policy was not public opinion but pri-
vate interest. The two most powerful men in the House
of Commons, whether they spoke much or little, were
Mr. Rigby and Sir Gilbert Elliot, the Paymaster of the
Forces and the Treasurer of the Navy. Their gains,
(so the Duke declared,) rose and fell with the amount
of money expended upon our fighting services ; and the
measures pursued by the Cabinet would be the means of
procuring to both of them princely fortunes. 1 Those
gentlemen and their connections, with the whole race of
money-jobbers and contractors, formed no small part of
the so-called independent majorities which, within and
without the doors of Parliament, had precipitated the
country into a cruel, a costly, and an unnatural civil
war.
Richmond discoursed well, and he was ably and
stoutly backed. The Duke of Grafton besought the
peers to seize upon an opportunity for peace and recon-
ciliation which, once lost, could never be recovered. He
assured the House, as he had every right to do, that he
had always been opposed to the coercion of America.
" I perceive in it," he declared, " nothing but inevitable
ruin. I contemplate it with the most pungent anxiety.
I turn my face from it with horror. These have been
my sentiments from the very beginning, and I have
uniformly acted conformably thereto. I have argued,
prayed, and implored that the wild and destructive proj-
ect might be laid aside." The Earl of Shelburne drew
1 Richmond probably exaggerated, to himself and his audience, the
gains of the Treasurer of the Navy. But Kigby would certainly have
raised up a princely fortune from the American war, had not his current
receipts, and indeed his stealings as well, gone mosUy into the pockets of
his creditors.
E2
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THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
a striking comparison between war which was unneces-
sary and unpopular, and war in which the nation had its
heart. He reminded his hearers how, when Lord
Chatham was defying and discomfiting France and
Spain, Great Britain sent, first and last, more than four
hundred thousand of her own citizens into the camp and
the fleet. And yet, so far from our trade standing still
for want of hands, the exports and imports increased at
a rate unknown during any former period. But now,
when we were opposed to a million or so of our own
colonists, whom the Ministry described as cowards, it
was contended that, without ruining our manufactures,
we could not raise one-fifth part of the native force
which flocked to our standards half a generation ago ;
and therefore we were reduced to run for succour to two
paltry German principalities as the only means of secur-
ing our political salvation.
Lord Camden, who had been Chatham's Attorney
General and Rockingham's Lord Chancellor, contemp-
tuously tore in pieces the theory that the treaties with
Germany were honourable international compacts,
founded upon considerations of reciprocal support and
common interests. " To give this bargain," he said, " the
appearance of what it really is not, the whole is stuffed
up with pompous expressions of alliance, as if these
petty states were really concerned in the event of the
present contest between this country and America.
The transaction is a compound of the most solemn
mockery and gross imposition that was ever attempted
to be put on a house of parliament. Is there one of
your lordships who does not perceive most clearly that
it is a mere bargain for the hire of troops on one side,
and the sale of human blood on the other ; and that the
devoted wretches thus purchased for slaughter are mer-
cenaries in the worst sense of the word ? " Lord Suffolk,
the candid man of the Ministry, who always addressed
the House of Lords in that downright conversational
style which the House of Lords prefers, did not concern
himself with the dignity either of the Landgrave of
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PROCEEDINGS IN PARLIAMENT 53
Hesse or the Duke of Brunswick. "The Treaties," so
he admitted, "are filled with high-sounding phrases of
alliance ; but I will be so ingenuous as to confess that
the true object of these treaties is not so much to create
an alliance, as to hire a body of troops which the present
rebellion in America has rendered necessary." Those
were the words in which an English Secretary of State,
talking plain common-sense to his brother peers, shat-
tered by anticipation the defence which in our own time
a German writer has set up for those German rulers who
traded in the lives of their people.
" The oratory in the Commons was pitched in a lower
key ; but it was a discussion even more damaging to the
reputation of the Government. The spokesmen of the
representative Chamber were business-like and minute
over a question into which finance so largely entered ;
and they would otherwise have been wanting to them-
selves and to their special function in the State. Lord
John Cavendish ruthlessly scrutinised the details of the
German contracts; and his criticisms went home to
veteran Parliamentarians, who well remembered how
thriftily, in the Seven Years' War, Frederic the Great
had husbanded the modest contribution which was doled
out to him from our Treasury for the promotion of high
objects common to England and to Prussia. More good
fighting, (so a famous authority has reckoned,) was got
out of that poor six hundred thousand a year than out
of any of the millions " which we have funded in that
peculiar line of enterprise." 1 Lord Irnham warned
the House of Commons that the old warrior of Potsdam
had a tenacious memory ; and that the very last thing he
would be likely to forget was the manner in which, with-
out due notice or decent apology, his British subsidy
had been snatched from him at the moment when he
was contending, almost without hope and against fright-
ful odds, for his life and Crown. He would not fail to
contrast that display of niggardly ill-will, which had so
nearly been his destruction, with the prodigal terms that
* Carlyle's Frtdtriek she Great: Book XVIII., chapter xi.
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THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
now were pressed upon the royal slave-drivers of Hesse
and Brunswick. In reference to those potentates, Lord
Irnham, who had read " Don Quixote " to some purpose,
quoted Sancho's wish that, if he were a prince, " all his
subjects should be black-a-moors, as he could then by
the sale of them easily turn them into ready money."
Burke told the country gentlemen that it was not so long
since the prime minister was beguiling them with a
promise of obtaining from America a revenue which
would relieve them from the land-tax. But now all
pretence that the enforcement of the tea-duty was a
profitable speculation for British tax-payers had been
abandoned ; and for every thousand foreigners whom we
had taken into our service we were to spend as much as
for fifteen hundred natives. Colonel Barre" commented
on the circumstance that English manufacturers, in the
dearth of orders, had looked forward to supplying uni-
forms for the Hessian Contingent as a set-off against
the losses in which the war had involved them. But
that market, like others, was closed to them ; inasmuch
as the Landgrave had stipulated that every article of
clothing and equipment should be made in Germany.
The colonel went on to ask whether, if the auxiliary
force was reduced to half its number by battle, pesti-
lence, or shipwreck, the payments to the Hessian and
Brunswick treasuries would be proportionately dimin-
ished ; and the Secretary at War helplessly acknowl-
edged that, until he had taken time to consider, he was
not in a position to answer the question.
That reply gave some indication of the amount of
forethought which had guided North and his Cabinet
when they opened the flood-gates of expenditure. The
division-list in both houses was affected by the wretched
figure which the occupants of the Treasury benches
had cut in the debate, and by the national jealousy
which the German treaties aroused in the minds of a
proud people, never very partial to a foreigner even
when he is not feeding at their cost. Of peers actually
present, three out of eight went against the Govern-
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PROCEEDINGS IN PARLIAMENT
55
ment ; and the Opposition, curiously enough, did ex-
actly as well in the Commons. 1 But with that flicker
of resentment the independence of Parliament, as ap-
plied to the question of national expenditure, for the
present ended. Throughout the Session Ministers got
their own way, and on most occasions got it very
easily. Twelve thousand additional seamen were voted
for the fleet, and the land force was raised to a strength
of fifty-five thousand men. On paper, at any rate, the
army was trebled by a single operation ; the estimates
for the fighting services were nearly doubled ; and the
price of Consols fell five points during the five opening
months of the year 1776. 2 Such were the first fruits of
those economies which were confidently promised when
the methods, by which Chatham had induced America
spontaneously to assist in the defence of the empire, were
exchanged for the policy of compulsory taxation as pro-
pounded by George Grcnville and Charles Townshend.
It was exactly what Burke had foretold. Months
before the Session opened, he addressed to Lord Rock-
ingham, and through Lord Rockingham to the Whig
party, a letter of exhortation so eloquent that it might
well have roused to arms even the garrison of that
Castle of Indolence. " As sure as we have now an
existence," he wrote, "if the meeting of Parliament
should catch your Lordship and your friends in an
unprepared state, nothing but disgrace and ruin can
attend the cause you are at the head of. I protest to
God that your reputation, your duty, and the duty and
honour of us all who profess your sentiments, from the
highest to the lowest of us, demand at this time one
honest hearty effort, in order to keep our hands from
blood, and if possible keep the poor, giddy, thoughtless
people from plunging headlong into this impious war."
1 Richmond's motion for an Address was supported by 29 peers, and
opposed by 79, exclusive of Proxies. The Treaties were approved in the
House of Commons by 242 to 8S.
2 The estimates for Army, Navy, and Ordnance were 3,879,264/. in
1775, and 7,541,049V. in 1776. The Funds were at 88 on the first of Janu-
ary 1776, and at 83 on the twenty-fourth of May.
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THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
That was no time, Burke urged, for taking public busi-
ness as part of a comfortable, leisurely, scheme of life,
mixed in with private occupations and amusements.
The occasion was one which called for the whole of the
best among them ; and, above all, for Rockingham.
America was his. He had saved her once, and now by
taking action betimes, might very possibly save her
again. If the honourable memories connected with the
repeal of the Stamp Act did not move him, at any rate
let him bethink himself how, only two years back, he
had come up to Grosvenor Square, without waiting for
the commencement of the London season, and had sum-
moned his colleagues round him to lay their plans for
defeating the proposal of an Irish Absentee Tax.
Human nature is not always at its highest level;
and heroic sacrifices arise only from heartfelt motives.
When their incomes were threatened by the Irish
parliament, the Rockinghams did not shrink even from
the hardship of living for the inside of a week in a
town-house with the carpets up, and covers on the
furniture. But when nothing worse was to be feared
than a civil war, and two or three foreign wars to
follow, they considered that the Newmarket meeting in
October was a reasonable date for breaking up their
establishments in the country, and coming South in
order to learn what Burke wanted of them at West-
minster. 1 Their lethargy was exasperating to clear-
sighted patriots, and especially to such as had been in
Parliament themselves, but were there no longer. M The
Opposition," Horace Walpole wrote, "seemed to have
lost all spirit. What little life there was, existed in the
Duke of Richmond and Charles Fox." 2
1 " It may be worth your Lordship's consideration whether you ought
not, as soon as possible, to draw your principal friends together. It may
then he examined whether a larger meeting might not be expedient, to
see whether some plan could not be thought of for doing something in the
counties and the towns. The October meeting at Newmarket will be too
late in the year ; and then the business of the meeting would take up too
much time from the other." Burke to Rockingham ; August 23, 1775.
2 The Last Journals of Horace Walpole : January 1776.
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PROCEEDINGS IN PARLIAMENT 57
Vitality enough, of one sort or another, most cer-
tainly abounded in the last-named of that pair of kins-
men. The most industrious, in his own way, of political
apprentices, he did not shape his existence after the
precepts of the copy-books. He was seldom in bed
before five in the morning, nor out of it until two in the
afternoon ; but into his fifteen waking hours he crowded
a mass of great and almost continuous effort on behalf
of the cause to which his life was now devoted. For
that cause he was always at work, with a somewhat
droll disregard of what others would consider to be the
fitness of time and place. Though he was attentive,
respectful, and nearly silent in company with Reynolds
and Johnson over the classic suppers at the Club, he
insisted that the companions of his lighter moments
should take him on his own terms. Most of them had
seats in one house of Parliament or the other; they
were all worth convincing ; and few among them in the
end resisted the spell of the enchanter. Charles Fox
had no notion of allowing his contemporaries, and,
(where he could find such in politics,) his juniors, to
have a will, or very many words, of their own about
the American controversy. Haranguing and bantering,
dominating and persuading, but never boring them, —
since that was an effect which an otherwise bountiful
Providence had made him constitutionally incapable of
producing, — he soon formed around him a band of
admiring comrades and declared adherents. In the
Commons, meanwhile, he made himself more felt week
by week, and session by session ; even though he
laboured under what to him was the unique disadvan-
tage of dealing with an assembly which still professed
to meet for the despatch of business at ten o'clock in the
morning.
Tradition has handed down the wonderful impression
caused by a single sentence which Charles Fox uttered
in the debate on the Address in October 1775. Wed-
derburn, passing lightly over the circumstance that Bos-
ton was the only spot in the thirteen colonies where the
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58 THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
British flag still floated, had attempted to defend North
as a war minister by drawing a parallel between him
and Chatham. Speaking late in the discussion, as was
usual with him for the most imperative of reasons, Fox
accepted the comparison, and carried it further still.
Not Lord Chatham, (he cried,) not Alexander the Great,
nor Caesar, had ever conquered so much territory in the
course of all their wars as Lord North had lost in one
campaign. A month afterwards Burke laid upon the
table his bill for composing the differences between
England and America. In view of so important an oc-
casion, Fox appealed to Lord Ossory in a lofty and im-
passioned letter which is still extant, and brought over
from the ministerial ranks that nobleman, and Richard
Fitzpatrick with him. It was a notable testimony to
their own disinterestedness, and to their young kins-
man's powers of persuasion. For the two brothers
were, indeed, connected by marriage with the Holland
family ; but they were nephews to Lord Gower, then
President of the Council; — a relationship which held
out to them a prospect of material advantages much
superior to any that for many years to come could
be expected from Charles Fox. Encouraged by that
signal tribute to the effect of his personal influence, and
with two voices more to cheer his oratory, Fox spoke,
(according to the quaint version of the official reporter,)
with infinite wit and readiness; carrying his finger along
the whole row of ministers, and " happily marking the
characters of each of them with a single epithet, with
fine satire, and without the least breach of decorum." 1
And then, naming himself and Ossory as tellers for the
Yeas, he collected in support of Burke a body of mem-
bers larger by twenty-five per cent, than that which
eight months previously the same statesman had been
able to muster in the same parliament over the same
question. And, on a Tuesday morning of the following
February, Fox got himself roused and dressed in time
to attend as soon as the House met, in order to move
l Parliamentary History, pages 991 and 992.
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PROCEEDINGS IN PARLIAMENT
59
for a Committee to enquire into the Causes of the ill
Success of His Majesty's Arms in North America.
Ossory seconded the motion ; Fitzpatrick supported it ;
and the three young fellows among them secured a
division which showed that there was plenty of right
sense and public spirit among the representatives of the
nation, if only they were properly handled. 1
But the tide of reaction was still running strong, in
spite of all that individual effort could do to stem the
flow. On the twentieth of November, 1775, Lord North
brought in a bill to prohibit trade and intercourse with
the thirteen colonies. The machinery of prohibition
was drastic and simple ; for it consisted in declaring
that the property of Americans, whether of ships or
goods, on the high seas or in harbour, was forfeited to
the captors, being the officers and crews of His Majesty's
vessels of war. The bill was combated in the House of
Commons by a series of prophecies, every one of which
in the end received exact fulfilment. Thomas Walpolc,
cousin to Horace, and nearly as infrequent and unwill-
ing a speaker, belonged to a family whose members,
whether they call themselves Whigs or Tories, have sel-
dom remained for long together in antagonism to the
dictates of reason and humanity. Walpole now admitted
that he had begun by approving the policy of ministers:
but his mind had been altered by the bad consequences
of their earlier measures, and the results of this last pro-
posal would be more calamitous still. The Americans
would retaliate by admitting into their ports ships of
other maritime powers, and would invite the foreigner
to supply their wants; a proceeding, (he continued,)
which would undoubtedly compel the British Govern-
ment to seize property belonging to the subjects of other
states, and so eventually involve the country in a disas-
trous European war. Lord George Cavendish, — who
knew Lancashire well, and Yorkshire and the Midlands
better still, — warned Parliament that manufactures
^e opposition voted 105 for Burke's bill, and 104 for Fox's Com-
mittee.
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THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
were already declining in almost every part of the king-
dom, and that this bill, after it had become law, would
throw above forty thousand hands out of employ-
ment.
Towards the close of the debate a gentleman stood up
who apparently had something which he was very much
in earnest to say, and who accordingly was treated as an
unauthorised intruder upon the attention of the House.
But he was a West Indian merchant with so much at
stake that he held his ground bravely amid a storm
of jeers and exclamations. He bade those vociferous
members, who were in such a hurry to have the ques-
tion put, to bear with him until he had appealed to the
Noble Lord on behalf of his estate which was going to
be taken from him by this bill. If all trade, (he as-
serted,) were stopped between our loyal and disloyal
colonies, the West Indies would at once be ruined. For
himself, he had in vain gone up and down the City of
London, ever since it had become known that this
scheme was in the air, offering a thousand guineas
as insurance for his cargoes now at sea, until he could
instruct his managers in Jamaica to ship no more of his
produce on American vessels. And yet his own case,
(so he explained,) was less desperate than that of his
brother planters who were in residence on their estates.
Many of them had the greater part of what they were
worth in the world on board American ships, now on
their passage to this kingdom. Long before informa-
tion had reached them that it was expedient to insure
their property against war-risks, the whole of that prop-
erty would be captured and confiscated ; so that, as far
as the interests of these poor people were concerned,
" war might as well have been declared between Great
Britain and Jamaica." When the nature of the bill had
been made evident, several Honourable Gentlemen en-
treated Lord North to postpone its further progress
until the West Indian merchants then in town could lay
before the House any information which they might
judge to be necessary. The request was curtly and em-
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PROCEEDINGS IN PARLIAMENT 6 1
phatically refused ; and the Government was sustained
in its inflexible attitude by overwhelming majorities.
The bill passed victoriously through all the stages ;
but, whether Ministers wished it or not, Charles Fox had
to be heard ; and heard he was. The most bigoted of his
opponents were glad to listen, and the most impertinent
would have been unable successfully to interrupt, while
he spoke with the unpremeditated ease of private con-
versation, and all the charm and force of oratory. 11 1
have always said," (such was the outline of his argu-
ment,) " that the war is unjust, and the object of it un-
attainable. But, admitting it to be a just and practicable
war, I now say that the means employed are not such
as will secure the desired ends. In order to induce the
Americans to submit, you pass laws against them, tyran-
nical and cruel in the extreme. When they complain of
one law, your answer is to pass another more rigorous
than the former. You tell us that you have no choice
in the matter, because they are in rebellion. Then
treat them as rebels are wont to be treated. Send out
your fleets and armies, and subdue them ; but show
them that your laws are mild, just, and equitable, and
that they therefore are in the wrong, and deserve the
punishment they meet with. The very contrary of this
has been your wretched policy. I have ever understood
it, as a first principle, that in rebellion you punish the
individuals, but spare the country. In a war against a
foreign enemy you spare individuals, and do your utmost
to injure and impoverish the country. Your conduct has
in all respects been the reverse of this. When the Bos-
ton Port Bill was under debate, I advised you to arrest
and punish the offending persons. But you preferred
to lay under a terrible interdict the whole population of
Boston, innocent and guilty alike. And now, by the
bill before us, you not only do your utmost to ruin those
innocent men who are unfortunately mixed up with the
guilty on the main-land of North America, but you
starve whole islands of unoffending people who are
separated from the rebellion by loyalty, and unconnected
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THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
with it by their political action and their political
sympathies."
It was common-sense, red-hot; and Ministers did not
venture to touch it except with the very tips of their
fingers. In the speech which did duty for a reply to
Fox, Lord North disclaimed all intention of distressing
our sugar colonies. If any provisions of the Bill should
injuriously affect the West India planters, he was sorry
for it ; but as things were now circumstanced that dan-
ger could not be avoided. In civil convulsions, it was
plain that many must suffer. If this measure was a good
one, Parliament must take it with all the consequences.
It was absurd to object that it would inflict temporary
inconvenience and loss upon this body of men or that
island, on this interest or that industry. Those were the
common-places with which the prime minister of Great
Britain excused himself for destroying the prosperity
of what were now the most valuable colonies which his
blundering policy had left to us. Times had changed
since Sir Robert Walpole, standing on the same spot
of the floor, had expounded and vindicated the system
by which, during twenty years of peace, he fostered the
ever-growing commerce of the empire.
North's phrases did nothing to comfort those unhappy
West Indians who saw the produce of their estates trans-
formed by statute into prize money, to enrich Lord Sand-
wich's favourite post-captains. The older and more
timid among the owners of plantations, who were victims
of this pitiless legislation, gave up the battle of life for
lost, and waited patiently and submissively for the day
when it should please their mortgagees to foreclose.
The bolder spirits diverted what remained of their capi-
tal into a line of business, the operators in which were
altogether independent of Acts of Parliament. They
gratified their anger, and at the same time turned many
a dishonest dollar, by carrying on a contraband traffic
with the revolted provinces. So far from the evil being
temporary, as North had assured the House of Com-
mons, there were parts of the West Indies which all
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PROCEEDINGS IN PARLIAMENT 63
through the war were at least as disloyal as Philadelphia,
and much more deeply disaffected than Charleston or
Savannah. As early as the spring of 1776 the Chief
Justice of the Bahamas reported that the town of Nas-
sau, in the island of New Providence, treated the royal
Governor with contempt, and that things could not be
worse if the place had been sold to the rebels. And in
1779 the Governor himself wrote to Lord Dartmouth as
follows : M I lament exceedingly, my Lord, the necessity
I am under in declaring to your Lordship that, since my
arrival at the Government, I have been in a second Hell.
The servants of the Crown, who are all engaged in carry-
ing on an extensive and lucrative trade with the rebel-
lious colonies, are now become the principal abettors." 1
The course of the Prohibitory B'll through the Lords
was rapid, and at first promised to be untroubled. Even
the Duke of Richmond had informed his leader that,
since British merchants had been so backward to sup-
port the Opposition in the country, he would not be at
any pains to defend their interests in Parliament. 2 But
he had not taken count of his own fervid temperament.
A discussion was raised on the Second Reading by the
Duke of Manchester, — a Montagu who did not, like
Sandwich, forget on which side their common ancestors
had stood when English liberties were in question at
Westminster and at Marston Moor. Manchester moved
the rejection of the Bill, and was cleverly answered by
the nobleman who, as long as the memory of him lasted,
continued to be known by the appellation of the wicked
Lord Lyttelton. He belonged to a family in which such
a pre-eminence is very easily earned. Though much less
good than other Lytteltons, in his own generation he
seems to have been no worse, and as regarded pecuniary
matters considerably more prudent, than plenty of other
lords. He saved all the money that he gained at cards ;
a proceeding which, in the opinion of his contemporaries,
1 Historical Manuscripts Commission : Fourteenth Report, Appendix,
Part X., page qo>
a Richmond to Rockingham; Goodwood, Dec. 11, 1775.
64 THE AM 'ERICA N REVOLUTION
was apparently almost as reprehensible as if he had
won that money unfairly. His private morals were not
blameless ; but neither were they exceptionally scanda-
lous when judged by the ideas of his time and class, and
by the standard of the government to which he belonged.
Lyttelton, at thirty years of age, and well outside the
Cabinet, might plead the example of a Minister more
advanced in life, and much more exalted and influential
than himself; for the Earl of Sandwich, — who was far
on in the fifties, and had no intention whatever of re-
forming when he got past sixty, — consorted openly with
a mistress who, to the disgust of Lord Chatham's old
admirals, did the honours, or dishonours, of the official
residence at Whitehall. Nor, for the eighteenth cen-
tury, was there anything particularly abnormal in Lyttel-
ton's political record. When the Session commenced,
as an independent peer, he had strongly condemned the
Government measures ; and now, as Chief Justice in
Eyre of the Counties north of Trent, he defended
those measures with the audacity of a recent convert.
It was idle, he affirmed, to talk as if the trade of the
West Indies was seriously threatened. Men of business
held the opposite opinion. The borough of Bewdley in
Worcestershire had expressed no uneasiness in view of
the operation of the Bill ; and Bewdley, according to his
generous computation, produced a full twelfth part of
our annual exports.
Lyttelton, as a Worcestershire land-owner, was in-
fluenced by the respect which a squire feels towards the
chief commercial town in his own neighbourhood ; but
that circumstance did not excuse him in Richmond's
eyes. Forgetting all about his grudge against the luke-
warmness of the mercantile classes, the Duke sprang to
his feet, and fell upon Lyttelton, and his market-town,
and his political antecedents, and his recently adopted
ministerial propensities, with an ardour which well be-
came Charles Fox's uncle. " My Lords," he exclaimed,
" I pronounce this bill to be fraught with all possible
injustice. I do not think the people of America in re-
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PROCEEDINGS IN PARLIAMENT 65
bellion. They are resisting acts of unexampled cruelty
and oppression." There arose a frightful commotion.
The peers, who supported ministers, shouted as if they
were so many contractors and loan-mongers representing
rotten boroughs in the Commons. The Earl of Den-
bigh stigmatised Richmond's words as treasonable, and
their speaker as a traitor. Lyttelton rose once more,
and eagerly assured the House that Cicero would have
severely reprobated such licentious language. The Cab-
inet did not contain a Cicero, but they had always Sand-
wich with them ; and Sandwich was ever ready with a
Second, — or, if needed, a second-hundredth, — Philippic
against the iniquities of the Colonists. The Bill, he con-
fessed, might appear harsh; but it did nothing more
than encounter cruelty with cruelty. For the Americans
were a barbarous, as well as dastardly, people ; and he
could assure their Lordships that among other crimes
they had put to death a negro of the name of Jerry, who
was worth several hundred pounds.
The assembly was by this time in a state of wrath and
excitement which few orators would have cared to face ;
but Richmond was not the man to be put down so long
as he had a tongue in his head, or a rapier at his side.
He spoke three times. He said straight out that he
would not be intimidated, or deterred from his duty, by
loud shouts or big words. He pretty plainly told
Denbigh, who formerly passed for something of a Jacob-
ite, that he, and such as he, were mighty poor author-
ities on a question of treason. The Duke had borne
himself gallantly ; but the aspect of Parliament was less
reassuring than ever to the advocates of a peaceful set-
tlement. A careful observer, not long afterwards, noted
that the tone of the Government in the Lords had be-
come much more aggressive than in the Commons ; and
that even in the Commons the language used by Min-
isters towards America grew more arbitrary, and men-
acing, as the Session proceeded. The friends of the
Administration had changed their style; all notions of
temporising were laid aside ; and it was openly pro-
PT. II. — VOL. I. F
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66
THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
claimed that force was the remedy, and that any attempt
at concession or compromise would only add to the dif-
ficulties of the situation. 1
The most commanding preacher of this high doctrine
was a public man of a very different stamp from Sand-
wich or Lyttelton. Lord Mansfield had now attained
the culminating point of a career, splendid in personal
success, and productive of vast benefits not only to his
country but to mankind. That career, which was still
far from ending, had begun so long ago that the earlier
associations connected with his name belonged to what
was already a classical period of English literature.
Nearly forty years had passed since Alexander Pope
had anticipated for William Murray a fame unsurpassed
by the most admired orators of ancient or modern his-
tory ; and twelve more years were still io run before
Lord Mansfield, amidst unusual marks of affection and
respect, vacated the Chair of the Lord Chief Justice of
England. In that Chair, for a generation and more, he
set an example not only to Judges, but to all servants of
the State. There had been hardly a day when he was
absent from his duties. He swept away the artificial
system of procrastination, and consequent expense,
which had broken the hearts of countless suitors. When-
ever an important judgement was delivered, people
flocked to his Court as eagerly as to the Strangers' Gal-
lery in the House of Commons when a Chancellor of
the Exchequer explains the Budget. Their expectation
was seldom disappointed. The silvery tones, the dig-
nified manner, the sparing but impressive gestures, which
had so long charmed Parliament, were admirably suited
to a judicial allocution. And the substance of Lord
Mansfield's disquisitions was worthy of the vehicle.
Before he retired into private life, he had completed the
task of enlarging and defining the scope of the Common
Law, and applying it to the infinite, and ever new, re-
quirements of a rich and highly civilised community.
Nor was his action confined to the more material and
1 Annual Register for 1 776 ; " History of Europe," chapter vii.
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PROCEEDINGS IN PARLIAMENT 6/
prosaic needs of his own and of coming ages. There
are few notable principles of liberty, of humanity, of
natural justice, and of supreme public utility, which
were not aptly illustrated and immovably established in
one or another of those celebrated decisions.
Lord Mansfield, who could not help being pre-eminent
whether he was doing right or wrong, is the most con-
spicuous instance of the value of the maxim that a judge
should not be a partisan. In his wise hour, no one was
more profoundly convinced of that truth than himself.
He three times statedly refused the Chancellorship; and
that great office, (it is hardly too much to assert,) was
always open to his acceptance from 1756, when Lord
Hardwicke resigned the Seals, until Lord Thurlow
assumed them in 1778. But, though he would not
desert the King's Bench, Lord Mansfield long retained
a hankering for political work and political influence.
He sat in Cabinets; he presided over the deliberations
of the Lords in the character, and with the salary, of
their Speaker ; for three months he was nominally, at
any rate, Chancellor of the Exchequer ; and, when party
fighting grew hot, he frequently descended into the
milie. But his heart was all the while set upon the due
performance of his judicial functions. He could not
give the requisite time and thought to affairs of State ;
and, if he had consulted his reputation and his self-
respect, he would have abstained altogether from public
controversy. Parliament after Parliament, while he still
was in the House of Commons, he had held his own
with William Pitt. But in the Lords his lifelong antag-
onist outmatched and overcame him ; and on more than
one occasion he was buffeted and flouted by adversaries,
not despicable indeed, but far less formidable than Lord
Chatham.
Mansfield, to please the Court, adopted quarrels so
far from just that he came to them, not thrice-armed,
but equipped with an altogether incomplete and ineffec-
tive legal panoply. And, (what was even more unfor-
tunate,) his senatorial action was of a nature to impair
F 2
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THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
his authority, and cast suspicion on his fairness, as a
Judge. Through all the miserable business of the
Middlesex election, the Ministry were continually en-
deavouring to punish in the law-courts those opponents
by whom they had been out-argued in the newspapers.
Oppressive prosecutions of publishers and printers in
the King's Bench alternated with angry, and sometimes
undignified, debates in the House of Lords; and Mans-
field too often had to pick his way back out of the tumult
with his composure ruffled and his ermine soiled. His
fame suffered, and his comfort was sorely disturbed, by
attacks compounded in deadly proportions out of truth
and calumny by the infernal skill of Junius. Before
1775 that storm had been finally laid, and the Lord
Chief Justice was again in calm water. But the
American question then became acute; and ministers
felt themselves so weak in the House of Lords that they
could not dispense with the assistance of their doughty
ally. That assistance was given by Lord Mansfield
without stint, and with no thought for the consequences
to his own reputation and popularity. His advice to
his countrymen, — as the mature fruit of his wisdom
and experience, — was that they should decline the
friendly advances of Congress, and rely, for the re-
covery of their American colonies, upon force, and upon
force alone. On the third reading of the Prohibitory
Bill he bore the main burden of debate. He summed
up his argument in an anecdote which soon ran the
round of England and America ; and able opponents of
the Government in both countries took care to extract,
out of what was at best a most unlucky utterance, the
utmost amount of horror which it was capable of yield-
ing. The relations of the mother-country and the
revolted colonies, (so Lord Mansfield declared,) recalled
to his mind an address made by a general of Gustavus
Adolphus to his soldiers on the eve of battle. " Point-
ing to the enemy, who were marching down to engage
them, he said : ' My lads, you see those men. If you
do not kill them, they will kill us.* "
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CHAPTER III
SIR GUY CARLETON IN CANADA. HOWE'S ARMY
Those were the terms on which, in the view of Lord
Mansfield, the armies of Great Britain went forth to
reconquer her thirteen provinces ; for nothing short of
a reconquest the undertaking would have to be. In
King's Speeches His Majesty was still made to talk
about "my colonies," and "my subjects in America."
He might just as well, (so an Opposition journalist
remarked,) have spoken of " my kingdom of France."
Whatever words his advisers put into his mouth, George
the Third understood, more fully and much sooner than
any of them, the reality which he and they had to face.
He discountenanced their tattle about American cow-
ardice. He awakened them sharply out of their Fool's
Paradise, and forced them to follow him into a course
of vigilant and unsparing toil. In a surprisingly short
space of time his energy had created the means of
grappling with a task the dimensions of which his in-
sight had promptly recognised. His fleets conveyed to
the scene of action a host more than twice as large as
that which Philip the Second of Spain placed on board
the Great Armada. In 1775 the Secretary at War had
informed the French Ambassador that three columns of
attack, amounting in all to between forty and fifty
thousand men, would converge upon the centre of the
rebellion from Boston, New York, and Canada. Boston,
now in the hands of the enemy, could no longer be
reckoned upon as a base of operations. The invading
force which marched in the summer of 1776 was, indeed,
not less strong by a single soldier than Lord Barrington
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THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
had anticipated ; but it was in two divisions, instead of
in three ; and the Southern portion, on which the brunt
of the work fell, was more readily handled, and far more
formidable, when acting as an undivided army under the
personal superintendence of one and the same general.
The Northern expedition was commanded by General
Guy Carleton, the Governor of Canada. His record as
an officer was better than fair. He had been placed to
the front at the capture of Quebec, of the Havannah,
and of Belleisle on the coast of Brittany ; and he was
wounded on each of those three notable occasions.
Carleton had learned to fight in Pitt's war ; and he was
taught something even more important than the art of
soldiering by a close observation of Pitt's policy. In
that age of slow travel, and precarious communications,
it was a distinct public advantage that, at critical times
and in distant regions, the civil and military authority
should be in the same hands ; if only those hands had
the right sort of head and heart to direct them. Carle-
ton was a sagacious, and a very good, man ; and his (
goodness and wisdom together, when all else was lost, ^
preserved Canada to the empire.
If anything could by any possibility be accurately
foretold in war and politics, it would have seemed most
unlikely that England should succeed in retaining the
/ district north of the St. Lawrence at a time when the
English-speaking provinces, for whose sake and by
whose aid we had wrested that district from France,
were in open and hot insurrection. So far were the
Canadians from speaking English that not four people
in a thousand talked anything except the old seventeenth
century French which had been brought across the
ocean in the days of Frontenac and La Salle ; — the
French which may be heard in Canada still. 1 The
> " Lord North. Does the General know the proportion of old subjects
to those of new ones in Canada ?
General Carleton. The Protestants in Canada are under 400; about
360 ; but the French inhabitants, who arc all Catholics, amount to
150,000."
Examination of General Carleton before the House of Commons in
Committee : June 2, 1774.
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SIR GUY CARLETON IN CANADA
71
country was intensely Catholic. Very few books were
read ; and those few had certainly not been written by
Voltaire. The priests were respected and powerful, as
their character and conduct merited ; and by far the
most important factor in Canadian politics was the
goodwill of the Bishop. A land system on lines of
strict feudality was everywhere in force. The seignior
held his estates from the Crown, and granted them to
his vassals on condition of a fixed and moderate annual
payment. The vassals were bound to grind their corn
in the seignior's mill, to bake their loaves in his oven,
and to hand over to him every tenth salmon which they
Anglo-Saxon in its composition, and which even the
peasants of rural La Vendee would have regarded
as behind the times, was ceded to Great Britain by
the Treaty of Paris in 1763, and soon found itself in
strange conditions. The British governed Canada with
equity and benevolence, but after a fashion sadly want-
ing in imagination, and altogether incomprehensible to
their new subjects. A constitution was granted, in
principle more liberal and democratic than that enjoyed
by England and Wales then ; or, indeed, in one respect
than that enjoyed now ; for the payment of tithe to the
clergy was no longer enforced by the State. French
Civil Law was superseded by the Common Law of
England, enriched with all Lord Mansfield's most recent
improvements. A Court of King's Bench was set up,
and a Court of Common Pleas, in both of which the pro-
ceedings were in the English form. The people were
emancipated from the liability of being imprisoned under
lettres de cachet, — a danger that had never greatly
disturbed them ; and they obtained trial by jury, which
they heartily abominated. 1 Above all, Canada received
the inestimable boon of self-government, in the shape of
1 "Mr. Mackworth. Did they disapprove the trial by jury ?
General Carleton. Very much. They have often said to me that they
thought it very extraordinary that English gentlemen should think their
property safer in the determination of taylors and shoemakers than in that
of the Judges."
caught in his waters.
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72 THE AMERICAN RE VOL UTION
a parliament from which no one was excluded who had
taken the oaths of Allegiance and Supremacy, together
with the declaration against Transubstantiation. As may
well be believed, it was a parliament that never met ; and
the administration was carried on by the Governor, with
the co-operation of an executive Council, the members of
which the Governor himself selected and nominated.
The outward semblance of British institutions was
accompanied by the substance of British public spirit
and financial probity. Canada, as a dependency of
France, had been the prey of corrupt officials. It was
a country, as Montcalm bitterly acknowledged, where
all the knaves grew rich, and true men were ruined.
But administrative honesty came in with English rule ; *
and the effects of that salutary change were all the
more visible because Canada, almost for the first time
in her history, enjoyed real and stable peace. The
French Government had treated the province as a mili-
tary outpost, and its people as the garrison. In seed-
time or in harvest, — when the creeks were swarming
with fish, and choice fur was selling at Albany or
Boston almost for its weight in silver, 1 — the farmers
and trappers who lived within the French border were
torn from their occupations, and marched off to fight
along the Alleghany and the Susquehanna, or to spend
winter after winter huddled into forts and blockhouses
in regions even more remote from their homes. There
was no respite from their involuntary toils and perils.
Even during those rare intervals when war was not de-
clared between the mother-countries, French and Eng-
lish settlers were constructing earthworks, and planning
1 An English officer wrote from Montreal in 1777 : M Caprice and novelty
has made these furs more or less in fashion. That they are so with a wit-
ness, the enormous price your sister gave for a muff and tippet is a con-
vincing proof. Here they are very dear : the commonest fur cap standing
you in two guineas." Beaver skins ruled high ; and sables ranged between
four and twelve guineas. Even with regard to the more common sorts a
Boston merchant reported in 1774, "Red Fox are at thirty-five shillings ;
Minks at thirty-three shillings and ninepence." The letter is among the
papers of Mr. Russell Sturgis, privately printed at Oxford.
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SIX GUY CARLETON IN CANADA 73
ambushes, and getting each other scalped- and toma-
hawked, in the valley of the Ohio. The Canadians had
been military colonists every whit as much as the Cos-
sacks of the Don, with a far less acute enjoyment of the
situation ; but, as soon as they became British subjects, |
that period of storm and stress was over. Thenceforward
on the Continent of America there was no one for them
to fight, unless they themselves thought fit to get up a
rebellion.
Not the least important contribution to the security of
the province was the firm and temperate attitude which
the British Government maintained in dealing with the
primaeval inhabitants of the American wilderness. The
history of Canada, for the first two centuries, was red and
lurid with the periodical outbreaks of that ill-used and,
(whenever it found an excuse for misconduct,) most ill-
conditioned family of mankind. French villages were
laid in ashes, and French Missions delivered over to tor-
ture and murder under circumstances which, in the es-
timation of their Church, qualified the victims for the
honours of martyrdom. But the English authorities,
while they did not neglect military precautions, endeav-
oured to acquire the confidence of the Indians, and in-
spire them with an interest in the preservation of order.
The red man was placed in safe possession of his hunt- 1
ing-grounds; and private adventurers were effectually
restrained from practising on the fatal facility for divest-
ing himself of his property which beset him when within
scent of a whisky-cask. So commenced, (as a local histo-
rian truly remarks,) that just and honest policy towards
the Indians which has ever since been followed by the
government of Canada. 1 The signs of improved adminis-
tration soon became apparent on the surface of society.
Trade and agriculture revived, and by the end of ten
1 This observation is made by Mr. T. Bourinot, Honorary Secretary of
the Royal Society of Canada. " I^inds," Mr. Bourinot writes, "could be
alienated by the Indians only at some public meeting or assembly called
for that special purpose by the Governor or Commander-in-Chief where
such lands were situated."
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74
THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
years had reached an amazing development Nothing
was wanting except some reasonable concession to that
national sentiment the due recognition of which con-
duces, even more than commercial prosperity, to the
establishment of national happiness and tranquillity.
When Carleton had resided long enough in Canada
to have thoroughly mastered the needs of the province,
he returned to England, and applied himself to the task
of indoctrinating the Ministry with his own broad and
| sound views. That process demanded a much more
protracted leave of absence than he had originally con-
templated ; but he comforted himself by reflecting that
he was better employed when furthering the interests of
his colony in London than if, (like Governor Bernard
and Governor Hutchinson,) he was undermining those
interests in despatches written on the spot, and filled
with abuse of the people over whom he had been ap-
pointed to rule. In the spring of 1774 Carleton's oppor-
tunity came. Ministers were then engaged on the penal
laws directed against the town of Boston and the colony
of Massachusetts ; and Carleton persuaded them to in-
sert into that batch of vindictive and provocative meas-
ures a bill framed with the object of conciliating Canada.
His advice was all the more readily adopted by the
Court party because the proposed enactment was in-
tensely offensive to the prejudices of New England.
The bill " for making more Effectual Provision for the
Government of the Province of Quebec " relieved Roman
Catholics from all tests whatsoever, save and except the
oath of Allegiance. The clergy of the old religion were
permitted to conduct their worship in freedom, and to
claim " their accustomed dues " from such persons as
professed their creed. Questions of property, and of
civil rights, were to be decided according to French
legal procedure ; while criminal cases were reserved for
the English law. It was a rational distinction. The
Criminal law of England, severe as it then was according
to our modern notions, at all events excluded the use of
physical torture, — or of that moral torture, almost more
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SIX GUY CARLE TON IN CANADA
7$
perilous to the innocent, which has not yet disappeared
from investigations conducted by French tribunals. 1
Other provisions of the bill were more open to damag-
ing criticism. The Canadian parliament was abolished ;
if that can be said of an assembly which never had a
corporate existence. Law-making was entrusted to a
Legislative Council appointed by the Crown ; and the
boundaries of the Province were extended to the Ohio
and the Mississippi. The whole area covered by what
are now the States of Michigan, Indiana, Ohio, Wiscon-
sin, and Illinois was converted into a Crown Colony
arbitrarily ruled from Downing Street. Such was the
condition to which it was the intention of North and
Sandwich to reduce a vast region, which had before it an
unlimited future of progress and civilisation. But this
part of the scheme existed only on paper ; and, in order
to turn it into a concrete fact, many thousand reams of
that commodity would have to be burned in cartridges.
The Quebec bill had faults ; but the main plan was
strongly conceived and boldly filled in. From among
the truculently impolitic laws, by which it is surrounded
in the Statute-book, it stands out as the work of states-
1 In 1834 Macaulay went to India, for the purpose of drawing up that
Penal Code which has met with acceptance and approbation from our
leading jurists. In his cabin, on the way out, he studied and annotated
with minute care Baron Locrc's treatise on the Civil, Commercial, and
Criminal Legislation of France. 41 1 believe," Macaulay wrote on the
margin of the seventh chapter, " that the commercial law of France, like
that of England, was in a very good state before the Revolution. It
required not to be amended, but to be consolidated and digested."
It was, however, very different when he came to the portion of the
book relating to the Criminal procedure of old France; — to the secret
inquisition ; the refusal of legal assistance to the accused ; the power, in
many cases, given to judges of arbitrarily allotting to the criminal any
punishment which they chose ; and, above all, the horrible nature of the
punishments, (as Locre describes them,) "the pincers, the melted lead
poured into the wounds, the wheel, and the furnace." Those paragraphs
arc freely scored with such pencil notes as " Odious ! " " A most absurd
practice." * Altogether detestable ! " Locre" introduced into his text a
rather misty anecdote about a compliment paid to the French Criminal
law, at the expense of England, by a personage entitled Lc Grand-Juge
d'Angleterre. " What Grand- luge? " Macaulay wrote. "Our penal code
is bad enough; but Monsieur le Baron Locre is an ass."
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76 THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
men, and not of policemen. The speakers of the Oppo-
sition, naturally but most unfortunately, were not in a
mood to discriminate between what was good, and what
was bad, in the ministerial recommendations. They
threw in their lot with the three or four hundred English
people scattered throughout the province, who assumed
to themselves the invidious title of " old subjects," and
who clamorously insisted that the civil and ecclesiastical
vestments of Canada should be cut according to English
pattern. In order to enlist the sympathy of Noncon-
formists against the bill, the Whigs raised, feebly and
unsuccessfully, a cry of No Popery ; — that ill-omened
watchword which, in after days, was often employed for
their discomfiture by opponents who understood, better
than they, the art of turning national passion to politi-
cal account. So high did party spirit run that the most
respected adherents of Rockingham and Chatham re-
sorted to this unworthy device. Before the debates on
the Quebec Act finally closed, the Peers were treated
to the astonishing spectacle of Lord Camden being
impressively and most properly rebuked by Lord Lyttel-
ton. The principles of the bill, (that eminent moralist
contended,) emanated from the Gospels, and breathed
the spirit of early and unadulterated Christianity. They
were principles not, as Camden had averred, of Popery
and servitude, but of toleration unfettered by odious
restrictions. It was a great and judicious measure ;
calculated, by the beneficence of its aspect, to remove
those rooted prejudices which were carefully instilled
into the minds of all, who had at any time been the sub-
jects of France, against the laws and the institutions of
England.
Having secured the Quebec Act, General Carleton
hastened back to his province, and made his prepara-
tions for meeting the storm which was soon to break.
He had only a handful of troops; but that want was
more than counterbalanced now that he possessed the
means of assuring the fidelity of the civil population. *
He at once proceeded to place eight Roman Catholics
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S/X GVY CARLETON IN CANADA
77
upon the Legislative Council. He arranged that the
members should be at liberty to debate either in
French or English, and that the ordinances which they
framed should be published in both languages. He
had acquired the warm co-operation of the Bishop, and i
the confidence and support of the seigniprs ; greatly to {
the annoyance of the nobility in France, who fav- <
oured the American Revolution, and thought it a very-
fine thing that all men should be born free and equal so
long as it was not in their own hemisphere. The mcr-
chaiits and large shop-keepers of Quebec, who alone
among the British inhabitants of the province had much
to lose, dreaded an invasion, and were quite prepared to
fight for the protection of their property whenever
Carleton should give the signal. American patriots*
had great hopes of the French farmers ; and, if those
hopes had been well founded, it would have mattered
very little how the rest of the Canadian population had
felt and acted. The Congress at Philadelphia issued a
spirited address, calling upon the tillers of the soil to
assert themselves against the aristocracy, and appealing \
to the immortal doctrines taught by Montesquieu and
Beccaria. But in a community where there was only
one printing house, and that an English one, those
great names had no meaning for anybody except the
priests ; and the priests feared and suspected the French
political philosopher less indeed, but not very much less,
than they detested the Italian philanthropist. The mass
of the rural people adored their clergy, and had no
quarrel with their seigniors. The most obtuse and inob-
servant peasants had already learned that a feudal
superior, under British rule, would have to be exceed-
ingly careful lest any well-founded complaint should be
made of the manner in which he exercised his privileges. 1
1 The very able author of the "History of Europe," in the Annual
Register pi 1776, acknowledges the anti-American attitude of Canadians,
both French and English, frankly but rather reluctantly. The event com-
pletely stultified many predictions made during the discussions in Parlia-
ment by that political party to which the writer belonged.
78
THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
Armed with his new Constitution, and as yet with
Uittle besides, Carleton made head, as best he could,
Jagainst the American invasion. The earlier exploits of
the colonists were conducted with energy, and crowned
with almost uniform success. In the May of 1775
Ticonderoga, the key which locked the chain of lakes
running north and south between the Hudson and the
St. Lawrence, had fallen before them as easily as Jericho
fell to Joshua ; and, in the early autumn of the same
year, a column of two thousand militia marched to the
attack of Canada. 1 The expedition was led by Richard
Montgomery, who was of good Irish birth, and whose
excellent abilities, and singularly loveable nature, had
been refined by a liberal education. He served under
Wolfe with credit, while still a lad; and he had but
lately attained the good military age of five-and-thirty,
— no small advantage for a general whose enemy had
to be sought, at the cost of infinite toil and hardship, on
the further side of an almost pathless wilderness.
Montgomery made his way through marsh and
thicket, against violent headwinds on Lake Champlain,
and amid treacherous rapids as he descended the Sorel
river. At length he arrived before the fort of St. John's,
which blocked the water highway at a point some twenty
miles to the southwest of Montreal. The English gen-
eral attempted to raise the siege, but was badly beaten ;
and on the third of November the place and the garri-
son were surrendered to Montgomery. Carleton, by
one stroke, was deprived of more than half the regular
troops whom he had at his disposal. The gateway of
his province was beaten in. Eleven British vessels,
with crews and stores on board, fell into the hands of
the Americans. Montreal was occupied without resist-
ance; the approaches to Quebec were beset by the
enemy ; and the royal Governor with difficulty contrived
to enter his own capital in the darkest hour of the night,
and dressed as a peasant.
1 At the end of this volume will be found a map of the country between
Quebec and Albany, adapted from Marshall's Lift of Washington, pub-
lished at Philadelphia in 1807.
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Sf/t GUV CARLETON IN CANADA 79
One solitary reverse befell the invaders; and even
that was something of a blessing in disguise to their
cause. Among Montgomery's colonels was Ethan Allen,
who had captured Ticonderoga in the name of the Great
Jehovah. On the strength of that achievement he ob-
tained a detached command, and took the earliest oppor-
tunity of falling upon the British in true Old Testament
style. His projected operation, in the outline of the
plan, and the numbers and distribution of the assault-
ing force, bore a curious resemblance to the enterprise
of Gideon ; but the event was different. The larger of
Allen's two bands did not appear at the appointed time
and place ; and he, together with his own small follow-
ing, was made a prisoner. His part in the Revolution,
memorable and serviceable as it had been, was played
out. The tidings of his misadventure affected his mili-
tary superiors with something very like a sense of relief.
It would have been far from easy for Washington to
find Ethan Allen employment which would both suit
and satisfy him, now that the war had got to a stage
altogether beyond the tactics of the Book of Judges. 1
Meanwhile danger was advancing upon Canada from
another quarter. Washington had despatched from
the camp before Boston a detachment of picked soldiers
under the guidance of Benedict Arnold. Arnold was a
New Englander, well born, and most certainly well sea-
soned. During the course of a wandering life, he shot
in a duel a British captain who had sworn at him for a
Yankee. The unfortunate officer was in the right, if
only he had expressed his opinion in more becoming
language ; for Arnold was abundantly endowed with the
restless vigour, and variety of resource, which marked
1 Mr. Bancroft, who seldom bears hardly on a celebrity of the Revolu-
tion, admitted that Allen was dazzled by vanity and rash ambition.
Washington made known his opinion in very plain words. "Colonel
Allen's misfortune," he wrote to General Schuyler, " will, I hope, teach a
lesson of prudence and subordination to others who may be too ambitious
to outshine their general officers, and, regardless of order and duty, rush
into enterprises which have unfavourable effects on the public, and are
destructive to themselves."
8o
THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
the race of men bred between the Hudson and the sea.
When fifteen years old he ran away from home to fight
the French on the northern frontier. Disgusted with
military service, — for some unknown motive, which may
have been anything except dislike of the smell of
powder, — he returned to New England, having trav-
ersed the intervening forest without a companion. He
made his living as clerk in a store, then as a shop-keeper,
and afterwards as a foreign merchant who sailed as his
own supercargo. After the Revolutionary war had
broken out, Arnold never missed an occasion for show-
ing the stuff of which he was made. He was as im-
petuous a forward fighter as Marshal Ney ; and he was
destined to an even more terrible fate.
With a courage proof against all the trials and labours
of war he started on an expedition compared with which
Montgomery's advance upon St. John's was a holiday
parade. His route lay up the Kennebec, down the
Chaudiere, and across the rugged and savage uplands
which separated the sources of the two rivers. The
fallen timber of centuries had choked the channels ; and
the water-shed was deep in snow. Provisions failed.
The travellers soon became barefoot, and their clothes
were torn off their backs by thorns. They towed their
little boats up to the waists in water. They retraced
some sections of their march three or four times over in
order to bring up the baggage of the party, and their
sick and dying comrades. After the first six weeks
they subsisted on roots and berries, and the game which
they could make shift to snare or shoot. They had
hauled the barges by sheer strength of arm up a hun-
dred and eighty miles of current, and had carried them
across forty miles of broken ground. They started
eleven hundred in number on the nineteenth of Sep-
tember. On the nineteenth of November Arnold, with
six hundred and seventy-five men who had come through
the journey alive, selected a position on the St. Law-
rence, eight leagues above Quebec, and there awaited
the arrival of Montgomery.
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SIR GUY CARLETON IN CANADA
81
On the third of December Montgomery came to the
rendezvous, bringing with him a force which the exigen-
cies and losses of the campaign had reduced even below
what Arnold could muster. But heroism is independent
of numbers; and the siege of Quebec at once began.
There was a hero on both sides of the wall. Carleton,
though brave as a lion, passes among writers for an in-
different strategist. He was, however, a justly popular \
ruler and a most capable organiser; and the state of
affairs was such that his special qualities and aptitudes
now came splendidly into play. He had with him a
poor three hundred red-coats ; if that name can be ap-
plied to soldiers who had worn their uniforms in those
latitudes, and at that season, through months of fright-
ful weather and almost continuous disaster; but his
humane and dexterous policy had united the whole
population of the city and the neighbourhood in ardent
support of the British cause. 1 He landed five or six
hundred seamen and marines, and allotted them their
posts in the circle of the defence; and he enrolled
about as many French Canadians, together with every
English burgess who was not too young, or very much
too old, to carry a musket. The Americans assaulted
Quebec on the night which divided the years 1775 and
1776; but they found the English awake and expecting
them. Montgomery was killed ; Arnold fell severely
wounded ; and three or four hundred of the assailants
remained as prisoners in the hands of the garrison.
Arnold, with a leg disabled, was worth more than an
average general who had every limb whole. With a
remnant of dejected American minute-men, and a few
{ hundred Canadian allies who had begun to perceive
that they had thrown in their lot with the losing party,l
he maintained a front such that he imposed respect on
Carleton, and kept up the appearance of an effective
1 " With respect to the better tort of people, both French and EnglUh,
seven eighths are Tories, who would wish to see our throats cut, and
perhaps would readily assist in doing it." Colonel Hazen to Major-
General Schuyler, from Montreal, Apnl 1, 1776.
ft. 11.— vol. 1. c.
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82
THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
investment of the city. He was joined erelong by
several detachments of militia, who marched to his
support in considerable numbers from New England,
from the Jerseys, and from Pennsylvania. They were
bent on avenging Montgomery and eradicating the last
vestige of British rule from the soil of their Continent ;
but they paid a heavy toll, in life and health, along the
road to Canada; and, on reaching their destination,
they found themselves in a scene of disease, destitution,
and misery. The American army was wasted by small-
pox ; the French inhabitants would bring in no supplies |
that were not paid for in ready money, and of ready
money there was none left ; while in the magazines there
remained something over one hundred-weight of gun-
powder, and provisions for a very few days. General
Thomas, — marked out for preferment on account of
his. having superintended the occupation of Dorchester
Heights which decided the event at Boston, — had been
appointed by Congress to the command in Canada. On
the first of May, 1776, he arrived at the camp before
Quebec, and ascertained that, of the forces which Arnold
and Montgomery had brought, and of the militia who
had come northward since, there remained less than
two thousand men, of whom half were in hospital, and
all on the brink of starvation.
Before another week was out three English ships of
war, the first swallows of the military summer, forced
their way through the ice on the St. Lawrence, carrying
reinforcements which enabled Carleton to take the
offensive. He sallied from the gates with six field-
pieces, and two strong columns of infantry ; whereas
three hundred men were the utmost that General
Thomas could succeed in concentrating from his ex-
tended and denuded lines. The Americans fled, leav-
ing behind them all their artillery, and a large number
of their sick. These poor people were sadly anxious
about the treatment in store for them, and crept from
bed to search for a hiding-place. But Carleton, who had
his own ideas of the spirit in which policy demanded
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SIX GUY CARLE TON IN CANADA
83
that a civil war should be conducted, issued a proclama-
tion inviting them to come and be nursed in the city,
and promising that they should have liberty to return
home as soon as they were sufficiently recovered to
undertake the journey. 1 General Thomas, closely pur-
sued for many miles, continued to retreat until he
reached the town of Sorel, where the river bearing that
name discharges itself into the St. Lawrence. The for-
tune of war had turned decisively ; and those denizens
of the country who were not stable and convinced politi-
cians, but who liked fighting both for its own sake and 1
for what they could get by it, now chose their side in I
grim earnest. A force composed of Indian warriors
and French hunters and trappers, with a small nucleus
of British regulars, beat up the American quarters to
the west of Montreal, and captured nearly five hundred
prisoners.
A transient gleam of hope brightened the darkness
which had begun to settle down upon the prospects of
the invaders. Washington, sorely grudging, had sent to
Canada three thousand of his best infantry under the
orders of General John Sullivan. A countryman of
Montgomery, Sullivan was the best of good fellows, and
a partisan true and tough as blackthorn ; but in some
respects he was not the most valuable sort of Irishman.
While fighting under Washington's personal supervision
he was an effective, and, indeed, a splendid officer; but
it was otherwise when he acted on his own account at
a distance from his chief. One of those fatal generals
with whom America has been cursed in every war which
she has ever waged, he was too loyal, too bustling,
and too popular to be passed over where it was a ques-
1 Carleton's Order, dated Chamble, August 7, 1776, ran thus: "All
Erisoners from the rebellious provinces, who chuse to return home, are to
old themselves in readiness to embark on a short notice. The Com-
missary, Mr. Murray, shall visit the transport destined to them, to see
that wholesome provisions, necessary cloathing, with all conveniences for
their carriage, be prepared for these unfortunate men. They are to look
upon their respective provinces as their prison, and remain there until
further enlarged."
G2
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84 THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
tion of a separate and independent command ; although
the operations for which, in that capacity, he was respon-
sible never went quite right, and sometimes resulted in
egregious failure. The troops whom Washington had
despatched reached Sorel on the fifth of June, 1776.
Three days previously General Thomas had died of the
small-pox ; and Sullivan assumed the command with a
sense of exuberant enjoyment. The right man for the
place, if ink won battles, he at once proceeded to relieve
the heart of his overburdened chief by imparting to him
his own cheerful reading of the military and political
situation. 11 1 have no doubt," he wrote, " of the gen-
eral attachment of the Canadians, though I suppose
some unprincipled wretches among them will appear
against us. I find by their present behaviour that the
only reason of their disaffection was because our exer-
tions were so feeble that they doubted of our success.
But the face of affairs seems to be changed. They
begin to complain of their priests, and wish them to be
secured. I shall, however, touch this string with great
tenderness, as I know their sacerdotal influence."
It was an epistle of the kind which poor Washing-
ton was fated often to receive from certain of his lieu-
tenants. Himself the most modest and matter-of-fact
of very great men, he became the unwilling confidant of
as enormous an amount of extravagant and bombastic j
writing as ever found its way into official correspond-
ence. He endured the infliction always with imperturb-
ability, and, (where he knew the writer to be honest,)
almost angelic indulgence. On this occasion, as in
duty bound, he forwarded Sullivan's despatch to Con-
gress, with a covering letter which placed in the most
favourable light that general's qualifications for the
command of the American army in Canada. But the
army was in Canada no longer. Sullivan had been in a
hurry to impress upon the French inhabitants that, (as
his letter put it,) the day of feeble exertions was over.
But he studied his ground badly. Carleton was already
very strong, and became stronger week by week, as
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SIR GUY CARLETON IN CANADA 85
reinforcements successively arrived from England, Ire-
land, and Germany. The British front had been ad-
vanced to the village of Three Rivers, only five-and-
twenty miles from Sorel ; although the St. Lawrence,
widened into the lake of St. Peter, lay between the two
places. Sullivan sent an expedition to surprise the post ;
but General Fraser, who was in charge of Three Rivers,
had been warned of what was coming, and was in very
much larger force than his adversary knew. The sur-
prise went the inverse way from what had been intended.
The Americans were completely routed ; and, as under
those circumstances people will, they tried to make up in
words for what they had come short in deeds. A letter
written by one of them, some days after the engage-
ment, speaks of it as an agreeable piece of news. Only
a score of the colonists had fallen, while vast havoc had
been made in the British ranks. A chaplain, who
claimed to have stood by and viewed the whole scene,
said that the slaughter was as great as at Bunker's
Hill. 1 But according to Carleton, who was a very un-
likely man to falsify a return, only about a dozen of
Fraser's people were dead or disabled. The American
brigadier, and two hundred of his troops, remained in
British custody ; the rest of them made a very undigni-
fied withdrawal ; and, if the colonists had as few killed
and wounded as they said, it was far from a matter for
boasting.
Sullivan took the repulse very seriously. 14 1 now," he
wrote, 14 think only of a glorious death, or a victory ob-
tained against superior numbers." But on the four-
teenth of June the English fleet, with Carleton's army
on board, moved up the river under full sail ; and the
American commander had the good sense to see that yet
a third alternative was open to him. He broke up his
camp, and retreated homewards, never reposing until he
was behind the lines of Crown Point, at the further ex-
tremity of Lake Champlain, some ten or twelve miles to
the north of Ticonderoga. The pursuit was languid ;
1 American Archives; letter of June 12 from St. John's.
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86
THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
but the sufferings of the colonial militia from disease,
and want of food, and utter destitution of everything
which makes fatigue and exposure tolerable, were ap-
palling. During the remainder of that summer Crown
Point was a charnel-house. Thirty new graves were
dug daily ; and it was reckoned that, in little over two
months, the American army of the North had lost by
desertion and death more than five thousand men. 1
That army, had the British been able to push their
success home, would not have escaped defeat, or rather
dissolution ; for power of resistance it had none. Carle-
ton was amply provided with troops, if only he could
have conveyed them without let or hindrance direct to
the point where victory awaited him. The ardour and
industry of George the Third had placed in the hands of
his general material means, plentiful enough to have
satisfied even a monarch who was going to command
his army himself. Brigadier Riedesel, 2 with the con-
tingents from Brunswick and Waldeck, landed at Que-
bec on the first of June ; in time to present himself,
attended by the whole body of his officers, at the levee
which the Governor held on the King's birthday. The
ranks of the British regiments were full, and the soldiers
in high health and buoyant humour. The train of
artillery was thought to be the finest that ever had been
sent from England. It was commanded by General
Phillips, a shrewd veteran who, according to mess-room
tradition, split fifteen canes on the flanks of his
1 The British, as they urged the pursuit of the retreating army, were ac-
quainted with the plight of their enemy. A soldier in the advance-guard,
who later in life turned historian, wrote thus: " They were encumbered
with great numbers labouring under that dreadful disease, small-pox,
which is so fatal in America. It was said that two regiments had not a
single man in health : another had only six, and a fourth only forty; and
two more were nearly in the same condition." An Original and Authen- \
tic Journal of Occurrences during the late American War, by R. Lamb, /
Sergeant of the Royal Welsh Fuziliers : Dublin, 1809.
8 It is on record, — as indicating the British soldier's small acquaint-
ance with the language of his allies, and the difficulty he must have found
in profiting by their conversation, — that our rank and file habitually pro-
nounced the Brunswicker's name as " Red Hazel,"
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SIR GUY CARLETON IN CANADA 87
draught-horses when he was bringing up the guns at
Minden. The best of the Canadian militia flocked to I
the standards of a chief who had inspired them with a-l
sincere loyalty, and a sense of civic dignity and self-
respect not altogether to the taste of our subalterns. 1
The Governor had been forced by peremptory orders
from London to arm and employ Indians : but he
steadily refused to commit his own and our national hon-
our to their more than questionable keeping. He main-
tained control over each tribe through a trusty agent of
his own selection ; and an American writer, who does not
love the English, has adjured history to preserve the
fact that, though often urged to let savages loose upon
the rebel provinces, in his detestation of cruelty Gen-
eral Carleton would not suffer a single one of them to
go on a raiding expedition across the frontier. 2
Carleton increased his power on land by drawing
freely on the complements of the ships which lay in the
St. Lawrence. A strong detachment of the Royal Ma-
rines served in his army, under the command of their
own officers, as was the custom throughout that war.
A major of the corps had ordered the first shot to be
fired at Lexington ; and many thousand cartridges were
bitten by the men before the struggle ended. For
George the Third, at such a crisis, was not inclined to
leave as good an infantry as any in Europe pipe-claying
belts, and eating rations, in their barracks at home.
Moreover his admirals in America knew better than to
strip the fleet of its scientific naval officers and trained
mariners, and send them up country for the purpose of
fighting as musketeers. And so it came to pass that the
1 "The women are extremely lively, goodnatured, and obliging, and
very neat in their persons, but have not the least pretentions to beauty.
The men are far from agreeable ; for, since they have enjoyed the bless-
ings of an English Government, they are become insolent and over-bear-
ing. When they fancy themselves offended their cry is, • Je vais le dire
au General Carleton.' " Those are the observations of a newly arrived
British officer, whose remark on the looks of Canadian women shows that
he was in a hurry to generalise from insufficient data.
* Bancroft's History oj f the United States, Epoch III., chapter 52.
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THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
Royal Marines were allowed a chance of proving what
they could do, and had the full credit for it after it was
done, just as much as if one of their generals had been
sitting at the Board of Admiralty to see that they got
fair play in whatever part of the world guns were firing.
The British sailors, however, were not excluded from
the joys and dangers of the campaign. Carleton gave
them plenty of the work for which they were profes-
sionally adapted. The real cause of the delay in his
forward movement was that the forest presented an im-
penetrable barrier to invaders who had not the com-
mand of Lake Champiain; — an inland sea, extending
seventy miles from north to south. It was impos-
sible to take craft of any considerable burden up the
turbid and broken stream of the river Sorel; and a
small gang of ship-wrights was accordingly collected at
St. John's, which was situated well above the Rapids.
Sheds and slip-ways were extemporised ; carpenters from
the men-of-war were told off to assist; and the little
dockyard was soon as busy as Sheerness. An eighteen-
gun vessel had been brought in separate pieces from
England, and was put together then and there. Five
brigs and schooners mounting between them forty-four
cannon, a score of gun-boats, and two hundred and fifty
armed or unarmed barges for the transport of troops,
were constructed on the spot, or hauled up the cataracts
by dint of almost incredible exertions. Those prodigies
of labour were executed by men and officers of the
Royal Navy, in a spirit of contagious jollity which ex-
tended its influence beyond their own service, and, (as
it has often done before and since,) contributed largely
to assure the success of the conjoint expedition. Nor
was that all. "Two hundred prime seamen from the
transports," (so an English post-captain testifies,) " im-
pelled by a due sense of their country's wrong, did
most generously engage themselves to serve in our
armed vessels during the expedition. Nor has any man
of this profession uttered a single word of discontent
amid all the hardships they have undergone ; so truly
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SIX GUV CARLE TON IN CANADA 89
patriotic are the motives by which they are actu-
ated." 1
The patriotism which takes the form of content and
self-suppression cannot be said to have been universal
in a camp that contained the prime grumbler of the
British army; for Burgoyne was second in command.
When the time came, as before long it did, for every-
one to have a fling at him, his enemies disseminated
a report that he had treated Carleton with the same dis-
loyalty as he had exhibited towards Gage. The charge
was probable, but has not been proved. It came mainly
from Lord George Germaine, who himself hated Carle-
ton, and habitually did his utmost to injure him in the
estimation of their Sovereign. But no whisper from
a minister, — or no extract, culled and copied from the
letter of a disappointed general beyond the seas, if such
indeed reached the royal eye, — could affect the King's
approval of his wise and faithful servant. Grateful to
Carleton for his recent services, George the Third made
adequate and intelligent allowance for his present diffi-
culties. He assured Lord North of his satisfaction
with the reasons given for postponing the commence-
ment of an aggressive campaign. Disregarding Lord
George Germaine's attempts at dissuasion, he made the
Governor of Canada a Commander of the Bath, (a much
rarer honour in those days than in ours,) and pleased
himself by sending out the red ribbon in charge of the
new Knight's own wife, together with a special warrant
authorising him to bear the title, and wear the ensigns,
even though the King's sword had not as yet touched
his shoulder. By the end of September 1776, all was
ready to Sir Guy Carleton's mind ; and he commenced
his stately and leisurely progress towards the south at
the head of twelve thousand effective soldiers, perfectly
disciplined, carefully exercised to fight in the woods
and row their flotilla along the lakes, and abundantly
provided with all the appliances of war.
1 Letter from Captain Douglas of the Isis : October 1776, American
Archives.
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THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
Meanwhile our principal army, and the larger portion
of our transatlantic fleet, had been despatched to the
middle colonies in order to strike at the heart of the
rebellion. General William Howe continued to com-
mand the land force ; while the naval operations were
entrusted to his elder brother, Richard, Lord Howe,
whose past had been as honourable as his future was
glorious. Over and over again, for the best part of two
generations, Richard Howe was found exactly where
his country most wanted him. In June 1 754, — a young
post-captain, who already knew how a gun-shot felt, —
he captured a French battleship in the Gulf of St. Law-
rence, after saluting her with the first broadside that
was fired in the Seven Years' War. At Quiberon Bay,
in a battle which ranks with the victory of the Nile, he
was named by Hawke to lead the British squadron into
action ; and, though his ship was out-sailed by some of
her consorts, when once she got among the enemy she
was out-fought by none. In October 1782 he relieved
Gibraltar, almost under the guns of a great fleet exceed-
ing his own by thirteen sail of the line, and gained a
triumph which, all the more because it was bloodless,
maintained the reputation of British seamanship at the
level to which, after a period of depression, it had been
raised by Rodney in the preceding April. And as his
crowning service, on the first of June 1794, Howe broke
the sea power of the French Republic. Those were
some of the achievements which secured to him a fame
and a popularity lasting over an extraordinarily pro-
tracted period of our history. In 1740 he had been
taken from Eton to accompany Lord Anson on his cele-
brated voyage; and, well into the nineteenth century,
young Englishmen of unusual manliness and dash were
still known in the Navy, and in India, by the appella-
tion of " Howe's Boys." 1
Such was the man who, on the twelfth of May 1776,
sailed from St. Helen's to conduct the naval campaign
1 Kaye's Life and Correspondence of Charles Lord Metcalfe ; Vol. L,
chapter 5; letter of January 18, 1805.
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HOWE'S ARMY
91
against the insurgent colonists. He was now a Vis-
count, having succeeded to the title when his elder
brother, as fine an officer as himself, was killed at
Ticonderoga in 1758. Lord Howe thought ill of the
Ministry, and especially of Lord George Germaine, with
whom he had been on bad terms ever since they took
part together in a calamitous expedition against the
coast of France. He regarded the conflict between
Great Britain and her colonies as a civil war, in which
Britain was in the wrong. In conjunction with Frank-
lin he had endeavoured to arrange conditions on which
harmony might be restored ; and perhaps he would
have attained his object if Lord Dartmouth, who fa-
voured that meritorious attempt, had been as bold and
outspoken as Lord Sandwich, who was bent on wreck-
ing it Howe took up his command with a sore heart
and an uneasy conscience. He was profoundly affected
by the circumstance that a junior officer, whose courage
he had proved, and whose judgement and character he
highly valued, respectfully pleaded political convictions
as a reason for declining an invitation from his old chief
to serve on board the flag-ship. Howe allowed it to be
known that he would not have gone out as an Admiral
unless he had otherwise been invested with the func-
tions of a negotiator. He, and General Howe, were
nominated as special Commissioners " to treat with the
revolted Americans, and to take measures for the res-
toration of peace with the Colonies." But the powers
conferred upon the brothers were limited to the point
of nullity, and almost of absurdity. Lord Howe, who
had deceived himself into a hopeful frame of mind, was
not many weeks in American waters before he had been
driven to recognise that the pacific side of his mission
was little better than a farce.
The younger of the two brothers came to the scene
of action furnished with much more potent arguments
for bringing the colonists to terms than any which the
Letters Patent appointing him a Peace Commissioner
permitted him to use. Simultaneously with General
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THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
Howe's embarkation at Halifax, large armaments con-
verged upon New York from various quarters of the
compass. He brought in his train the former garrison
of Boston, which in itself was an army. These troops
were not, like Carleton's, flushed with victory ; but they
were angrily and proudly conscious that, though forced
to abandon the post which had been committed to them,
they had never been defeated in battle. In the same
temper, very dangerous to an opponent, the seven regi-
ments, which had been foiled at Charleston, came from
the Carolinas under the leadership of Clinton and Lord
Cornwallis. Three thousand Highlanders had been
shipped at Glasgow; a fourth part of whom were
captured at sea by the American privateers. 1 Some
battalions came direct from English ports, and some
from Ireland. They were closely followed by two
divisions of Hessians, nine thousand strong, which,
though not of uniform quality throughout, comprised
the flower of the foreign contingent. During the
voyage the Germans complained of parsimonious diet
and bad accommodation, and especially of the light and
scanty blankets which were in painful contrast to the
feather-beds they had left behind them in the Father-
land. But they were in excellent health. The food
supplied by contractors was no worse, and more plen-
tiful, than what they had been accustomed to in the
Cassel barracks. Their pay continued to mount up
whether they were well or sea-sick ; and the discomforts
of ocean travel only increased the satisfaction which
they felt in the near prospect of placing their feet upon
solid soil.
Taken as a whole, it was a most efficient army.
The weak point in the British military system was the
impossibility of ensuring that the best man, or even
a fairly good man, should command a battalion. How
1 The crews of our transports, when the enemy appeared, had refused
to defend, or even to handle, their ships ; and, after the sailors had gone
below, the Scottish soldiers had made a gallant but, from the nature of
the case, a hopeless resistance.
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HOWE'S ARMY
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great and wide-spread was the evil may be gathered
from the condition of two regiments belonging to the
comparatively small portion of Howe's army which was
drawn from Ireland. " I am extremely concerned," (so
the Commander-in-Chief at Dublin wrote to the Lord
Lieutenant,) "that no purchaser can be found for
Lieutenant Colonel B 's commission ; for, besides
his infirmities, I have his own word, added to the
testimony of other people, that he is mad. Since I
began this, the Colonel of the seventeenth regiment has
been with me, humbly requesting your Excellency's per-
mission to dispose of his Lieutenant Colonelcy. I never
saw the gentleman before ; but he is in a most wretched
state of health, overcome with the gout, and barely
able to walk. He protests that he has been about to
sell these three years, and that he shall only be put on
board ship to die." 1 Such instances constantly occurred
at every succeeding outbreak of hostilities; and the
authorities at the Horseguards, who were not devoid of
human feeling, found it no easy matter to deal with them.
Duty came in a cruel shape upon a Commander-in-Chief
when he was forced to compel an old brother officer with
a large family, who had invested in his Commission all
his property and a good deal of borrowed money
besides, to make a forced sale in a market which had
gone entirely to pieces, as the Commission market
always did in time of war.
Even when a colonelcy was vacant, it did not neces-
sarily fall to an officer whom the regiment knew, and
who had served with it in the field. The Guards bore
numerically a much larger proportion to the rest of
the army than at present ; their lieutenants ranked as
captains, and their captains as lieutenant-colonels ; and
the social position and private means of those gentlemen
enabled them at every successive opportunity to make
the most of their advantages. During the early months
expression in the newspapers. "The rise in the
1 General Irwin to Earl Harcourt, September I, 1775.
of 1776 this grievance of the
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94 THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
Guards," (one letter runs,) " is so rapid, from the sup-
pression of the ranks of Lieutenant and Major, that
officers of the Line have always the mortification to
find, after long and painful service, a body of men who
supersede them in their profession, and claim most of
the elevated posts in the army. When the road seems
smooth to a regiment, an inundation of captains in the
Guards, by dint of Court rank and etiquette of pre-
cedency, defeat all the prospects of the actual soldier,
and trample on a life of dangers and fatigues." Junius,
who knew our War Office from the inside, computed
that the number of commissioned officers in the Guards
were to those of marching regiments as one to eleven ;
but that the number of regiments given to the Guards,
compared with those given to the Line, were as one to
three. 1
England, perhaps, never entered upon a great
military enterprise with so large a supply of men
qualified by standing and experience to lead her bat-
talions. " The two last wars," wrote General Burgoyne,
" have filled the army with excellent officers from the
year 1743. The military science, which in the course
of the long peace had degenerated into the tricks of
parade and the froth of discipline, has been attentively
considered both in theory and practice; and to the
honour of the cloth be it said that there are few sets of
officers now to be met with where an ignorant man
could converse upon his profession without exposing
himself." That passage referred to a period so far back
as 1 76 1 ; and the intervening fifteen years had made
havoc with the veterans of Dettingen and Fontenoy.
But, when fighting began in 1775, there were many
officers above the rank of lieutenant, (and, where a man
was poor, too often still in that rank,) who had served
under Ferdinand of Brunswick and Lord Granby in the
Seven Years' War ; and in that war British valour was
guided by the minute and well-considered precepts of
1 London Evening Post for February 1776. Author's note to the
Letter of Junius of December 19, 1769.
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HOWE'S ARMY
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Prussian discipline. The strategy of our generals in the
American campaigns is instructive to military students
by warning rather than example ; but, when it came to
tactics, it is abundantly evident that the officers of our
regiments, and our brigades, were at home in all the
details of warfare. Arrangements for the march and the
bivouac, for out-posts and scouting, and for the supply
of food, forage, and ammunition, worked smoothly and,
to all appearance, automatically. Our light dragoons
gave close attention to their less showy, but not least
important, duties. They were always to the front, and on
the flanks, in an advance ; and, whenever general opera-
tions were suspended, they shot forth on excursions,
searching the country far and near, and harrying and
bewildering the Americans who, north of the Potomac
at least, were no great horsemen. The essential routine
of battle was admirably understood in our army.
Cavalry charged at the right moment, and halted
before rashness had converted a success into a disaster.
Infantry were taken into action over ground reconnoitred
with as much care as time permitted, and in a formation
promptly and almost instinctively selected out of several
which had been made familiar beforehand by frequent
practice ; and, when the task was beyond their strength,
the coolness and method of the retreat was seldom, if
ever, allowed to degenerate into a rout.
Our line regiments were officered from the less
wealthy, and more hardy, section of a rural aristocracy.
The sudden and recent influx of opulence, which had
done so much to foster corruption in politics and luxury
in fashionable society, had not as yet penetrated to our
smaller land-owners. A cadet of good family, whether
the younger son of a squire, or the eldest son of a
parson, (who in the nature of things was seldom an
eldest son himself,) very generally lacked the means of
buying his way into the upper grades of the army.
Hopeless of arriving even at the threshold of high
military advancement, men of this class loved their
profession all the more because they loved it for itself.
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96 THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
Renouncing, in many cases, all hope of marriage, they
looked upon the regiment as their home, and grew old
in uniform. Coming of a strong-natured and whimsical
race, in a century when men were never ashamed of
being themselves, they not unfrequcntly, as years
increased upon them, acquired a marked, and some-
what quaint, individuality. Great readers, many of
them, during the break between one war and the next,
their favourite authors were those in vogue at a time
when a scholar was a man who understood Greek and
Latin. If one of them took up his pen in a military
controversy, — and very sensible letters they often
wrote, — he would sign himself in the newspapers as
11 Valerius," or 11 Postumius " ; or as " Cincinnatus,"
in case he had retired on half-pay. When discussing
professional topics, they drew most of their illustrations
from the same classical sources as those to which Flu-
ellen resorted ; but in them, as in that Welshman, there
was much care and valour. The object of their life
was the efficiency and the reputation of their regiment.
They were sincerely respected by the subalterns, from
whom they did not exact undue and unwilling defer-
ence. "Any restraint upon conversation, off parade,
unless when an offence against religion, morals, or
good breeding is in question, is grating ; and it ought
to be the characteristic of every gentleman neither to
impose, nor to submit to, any distinction but such as
propriety of conduct, or superiority of talent, naturally
create." Those were the formal and punctilious
phrases in which Burgoyne, himself the model of a
field-officer, described the tone of a good English mess
room containing a major and half a dozen captains who
had served in Germany.
Nothing was allowed to interfere with good fellow-
ship, and with a theory of the social equality that ought
to exist between one gentleman and another; and yet
the authority of a military superior, when he judged fit
to exert it, was not to be trifled with. A lecture from
a colonel or general was a rare occurrence, and was
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HOWE'S ARMY
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couched in language suited to a state of society when
offence was easily taken and quickly resented ; but
those who listened to it knew that it meant business. 1
Kindly and tolerant towards their younger comrades,
these old officers did not confine their friendliness to
the commissioned ranks. They looked after the wants
of the men, and were mindful of their feelings. They
treated the sergeants and corporals, who frequently had
been as long in the regiment as themselves, as their
elder brothers at home would behave to old and trusted
family servants. That was their course of life until, —
with such limbs as the French cannon, and the uncom-
promising surgery of an heroic epoch, had left to them,
— they settled down, on an income counted by tens of
pounds, under a very humble roof beneath the elms of
their native village.
Howe's army contained a noble specimen of this
class of officer. To Colonel Enoch Markham, as the
brother of an archbishop, promotion came in less stinted
measure than to some ; but he earned all the gifts which
fortune bestowed upon him. He was forty-nine years
old at the opening of the campaign, throughout which
1 General Phillips of the Artillery had the character of understanding
to perfection how a thorny matter should be handled. Some subalterns
of his corps, stationed at Montreal, had been dining with a Canadian
gentleman, whose daughters were pretty, and whose wine was only too
good. Before the entertainment had been concluded, the guests became
so impertinent that the host next morning made a complaint to the
General, and threatened, unless redress was granted, to set oil to Quebec,
and lay the case before Governor Carleton. Phillips, at his next levee,
desired the officers of the artillery to remain after the rest of the company
had departed. " I do not," he said to them, " know who has been guilty
of such conduct. I am sure it could not have been any of the young
gentlemen; for certainly their persons and address, when they solicit the
fair, would have ensured them success. I neither know who the officers
were, nor do I wish to be informed; but let me advise them, when they
next approach the ladies, to pursue different means, as they may rest
assured that those which they have adopted will never succeed. I only
desire that I may never hear more of such complaints; nor need I suggest
to those gentlemen, who are conscious of being concerned, that it is
compatible with their characters to make an apology to the father of the
young ladies." The General's advice was taken ; and the affair ended
without cither a duel or a court-martial, and apparently to the satisfaction
of everybody concerned.
PT. II.— vol. L H
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THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
he was sedulously attentive to the comfort of the troops,
and neglectful of his own. " There being," he wrote in
January 1777, "a plentiful scarcity of everything here,
it is with difficulty that I continue to live. If it was not
for my faithful old soldier-servant, I should starve. He
answers the character of Sterne's Corporal Trim. He is
a charming figure for a porter at a great man's gate, or
for a Yeoman of the Guard." Colonel Enoch continued
to serve in America until the end of the war, with the
highest character for personal courage and patriotic dis-
interestedness. At different times he was entrusted
with a brigade, and occasionally had a separate command.
He was supposed to have given offence to those above
him by refusing to accept Secret Service money, " with
an understanding, then too prevalent, that it was fair per-
quisite, and never to be accounted for to the public."
We are told that "some singularities appeared in his
character ; but all tending to his honour. When at the
head of his regiment on a march, he always made some
tired soldier ride his horse, and marched through
every kind of bad ground, and partook of every awk-
wardness of situation that his men were exposed to.
His cool courage, and contempt of personal danger,
were almost proverbial in the army. On one occasion,
when under a heavy fire, he heard talking in the ranks.
He turned his back upon the fire, commanded silence,
and harangued the men upon the discipline of the Lace-
daemonians." Upon another occasion his regiment,
while advancing amid a shower of bullets, was brought
up short by a wooden fence. Colonel Markham coolly
and deliberately went up to the palings, pulled at them,
and found that they might be forced. After the action,
some of his officers represented to him the imminent
danger to which he had exposed himself unnecessarily,
as he might have sent a private upon the same service.
He answered with warmth : " Good God ! do you sup-
pose I would send any man on a service of danger
where I would not go myself ? " Having at last been
badly wounded, (and no wonder,) he was sent, by way
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of a health-resort, to the island of St. Lucia between
Martinique and Barbadoes, where the heat of the cli-
mate brought on a dangerous illness which necessitated
his retirement from the army. " He passed the rest of
his life at a lodging in Lambeth, seeing very much of
the Archbishop ; " — a good sample of the sterling ma-
terial which made the strength of our country in the
eighteenth century. 1
The war was not popular among the rank and file
of our army. There was the certainty of one voyage
across the Atlantic, and the remote prospect of another
for those of them who were strong enough, or lucky
enough, to see the business through. It may confi-
dently be asserted that no one has profited more by the
great discoveries of modern science than the British
soldier. An ambitious military man, who followed his
opportunities of distinction in sailing-ships all the
world over, spent more of his time on deep water, and
was much more likely to terminate his career beneath
it, than an officer of the Royal Navy in an age of
steam. The army officer, indeed, had the worst of both
professions; for the merchantmen, which were pro-
vided to carry him from one scene of duty to another,
were the very refuse of our trading fleet. The toils
and perils of a campaign were to him less formidable
than the hardships, the delays, and the disappointments
of the voyage, — the preliminary weeks spent in the
Channel, waiting for a wind inside the Solent, and sight-
ing the Lizard on the day that he had hoped to find
himself off New York ; the horrors of a gale between
the decks of a crowded unseaworthy bark, with no
employment or responsibility which would take his
mind off the imminent danger and the ineffable dis-
comfort ; and, in an interval of calm, the tedious round
of an everyday existence which combined all that was
most odious on both elements. Idleness and disgust
1 The particulars relating to Colonel Mark ham are drawn from an un-
published history of his family ; which was kindly, and indeed generously,
lent to me by Sir Clements R. Markham, K.C.B., F.R.S.
H2
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gave rise to scandals and court-martials, and to quarrels
about precedence, where precedence meant the title to
a cabin not quite so wretched as others, and the power
of shifting quarters on board a less ill-found vessel.
An officer actually fought a duel on his way out to
America, was severely wounded, and had time to be
cured before he arrived in port. A good commander
would keep his people occupied, by setting the soldiers
to shoot at a mark for prizes, and encouraging the
subalterns to make up the leeway of a scamped and,
(in the best of cases,) an unfinished education. But
the most resourceful and unselfish of colonels or majors
could do little for the health and happiness of the
privates. Fetid water, kept in wine casks that never
had been properly cleansed ; poisonous beer ; biscuits
alive with maggots; beef that had been left over from
the voyage before last; and, what was worse than all,
(kind-hearted as they were,) the sight of their suffering
and dying horses, and of their comrades swallowing the
rust of the anchor-stock in brandy as a specific against
the miseries of dysentery ; — those were the circum-
stances which gained for a transport the name of a
floating Hell.
Nor, in the anticipation of soldiers who left England
in the spring of 1776, was it a Paradise towards which
they were journeying. Letters from the garrison of
Boston had been read aloud in the barrack-rooms,
which depicted in very dark colours the hardships
awaiting them on the further shore. They were going
to a land of plenty ; but the plenty was not for them.
The ration of a British private, they were told, was less
than half a pound of salt bony pork, and no vegetables
whatever. He had to pay twenty pence for cheese, and
fourteen pence for old rancid Irish butter, at a time
when the rebels, outside the town, were buying large
pigeons at fourpence a dozen, and the best butcher's meat
at three half-pence a pound ; while turkeys and roasting
pigs were thrown into the scale together, and sold at
the same price. This story was sent to England by a
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HOWE'S ARMY
101
grenadier of Marines, who had been recalled to the
regiment from his employment as porter in a ware-
house. He had cried, (he said,) ready to break his
heart for going on that damned service, instead of
against the French and Spaniards. 1 But there was,
in most cases, no hanging back from the call of duty.
The Guards set a good example. A battalion of a
thousand had been formed for service in America, by
picking fifteen men from each of their sixty-four com-
panies. The officers left at home their spontoons, and
the sergeants their halberts. All ranks carried firelocks,
and knew how to use them. For some time past they
had been "practising with a rifle-gun in Hyde Park,
against a small target three hundred yards off," — at an
hour in the morning, it is to be supposed, when the
citizens and their families had not yet come out to take
the air. Towards the end of March they were reviewed
by the King at Wimbledon, and moved off the Common
in the direction of Portsmouth, taking with them a score
of field-pieces, and the whole of their baggage succinctly
packed into thirty waggons.
Our forefathers were accustomed to see expeditions
go forth without those manifestations of enthusiasm
which a French military writer has described, and dep-
recated, as " les ardeurs du depart." 2 The troops were
allowed to leave the country very quietly; but they
fought none the worse on that account They were
hard fellows, bred for the most part in rural districts ;
at home among horses, and better shots than the gentry
of their neighbourhood either desired or approved.
Many of them were in the habit of stalking game and
wild-fowl over the unenclosed and un drained tracts
which still covered so wide a surface of our island. Not
a few had been poachers, — a circumstance to which,
(as afterwards in the Peninsula and at Waterloo,) cap-
tains acquainted with the personal history of their com-
panies attributed, in some considerable degree, the
1 L/Ctter in the Evening Post, January 1 776.
2 General Trochu's VArmee Franfaise en /S67, chapter xix.
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102 THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
deadly effect of the British fire. 1 Subsequently to their
arrival in America the troops were carefully instructed
to shoot, not only at a target, but in skirmishing order
among the ravines and thickets. The next five years
tested and ascertained the warlike capabilities of our
race. For the colonists, after one twelvemonth of dis-
order and of very frequent defeat, were drilled and
organised up to such a point that they ever afterwards
met the regulars on an equality in the open field ; while
the British, from the very first, plunged vigorously into
a course of forest warfare against a community of hunt-
ers and backwoodsmen. Our people, wherever and
whenever they met the enemy, often secured, and always
were bent on obtaining, victory; and they never ac-
quiesced in a repulse, or even in a drawn battle, until
their list of killed and wounded bore impressive tes-
timony to the efforts which they had made to avert dis-
comfiture.
Howe's army, if the different sections could have been
united at the beginning of the campaign, would have
amounted to about thirty-five thousand men. "This
force," (so wrote a contemporary historian of high
merit,) " was truly formidable, and such as no part of the
New World had ever seen before. Nor was it, perhaps,
exceeded by any army in Europe of an equal number,
whether considered with respect to the excellency of the
troops, the abundant military stores and warlike mate-
rials, or the goodness and number of artillery of all sorts
with which it was provided. It was, besides, supported
by a very numerous fleet, particularly well adapted to
the nature of the service." 2 Both fleet and army were
due to the recent exertions of the King, rather than to
1 A similar cause largely contributed to the early victories gained by
the French in the wars of their Revolution. In the first armies of the
Republic the skirmish-lines swarmed with gamekeepers whom the aboli-
tion of feudalism had deprived of their employment, and with poachers
whomever since the fall of the Bastille emboldened them to work by day-
light,) had killed down all the game, and whose occupation was gone.
"The Annual Register for 1776 ; chapter v. of the "History of
Europe."
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HOWE'S ARMY
IO3
the pair of improvident ministers in charge of the War
Office and the Admiralty. If things went well, the
credit would accrue, not to Sandwich and Barrington,
but to their royal master, and to the Secretary of State
for the Colonies. Lord George Germaine, according to
Selwyn, seemed in very great spirits, and quite persuaded
that the first campaign would end the war, and estab-
lish, or, (if people liked that expression better,) re-estab-
lish his own reputation. For the present he had
something to endure ; because, when he took part in a
parliamentary debate, " the Ghost of Minden was for
ever brought in neck and shoulders to frighten him." 1
But Germaine, in his duel with Governor Johnstone,
had stood opposite the most redoubted pistol in the
House of Commons ; and he did not feel himself bound
to fight twice, and still less a dozen times over, in ex-
actly the same quarrel ; just as Daniel O'Connell re-
served to himself the liberty of accepting or declining
a challenge, when once, to his lifelong regret, he had
killed his man. 2 Jack Wilkes and Alderman Sawbridge
might talk about Minden till they were hoarse, for all
that Germaine cared. He looked for his reward to
higher quarters. George the Third did not bear his
minister any grudge on account of an incident which
was ancient history ; and about which, in the royal opin-
ion, more than enough had been said already. The
King took no interest in the reminiscences of the Seven
Years' War. The glory derived from that celebrated
struggle belonged to Frederic the Great, whom he
neither understood nor liked, and to Lord Chatham,
whom he cordially detested. But this war was all his
1 George Selwyn to Lord Carlisle : December 8, and 12, 1775.
2 London opinion upon Lord George's conduct in his quarrel with Gov-
ernor Johnstone is expressed in a letter from William Whitehead to Lord
Nuneham of the twenty-second of December 1770. The Poet Laureate
was somewhat more at home in prose than in verse. "The Minden affair,
at so many years distance, has been got the better of by the drawing of a
trigger. The Grecians and Romans, whom your lordship has been read-
ing of so much of late, did not deal in duels. They murdered and assas-
sinated heroically ; but they thought exposing themselves to any danger
in defence of their country a sober, serious, honourable thing."
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104 THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
own. He was in sympathy with the policy which led
to it He, and none else, had provided the means for
carrying it forward ; and he now, with quiet and dig-
nified confidence, waited for tidings of victories which
would place America at his feet.
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CHAPTER IV
CONGRESS. THE REVEREND WILLIAM GORDON.
THE PROVINCIAL GOVERNMENTS
The statesmen of the Revolution, assembled in Con-
gress at Philadelphia, looked forward to coming events
less complacently than did the resolute and self-reliant
prince who, even according to their own admission, was
still their sovereign. Within a few months, at the
latest, they would have upon them a hostile army,
strong in numbers and discipline, and backed by the
entire resources of a stable and well-ordered empire.
It was true that in Great Britain opinion was very far
from unanimous ; but opposition to the government
policy went no further than speeches in the two Cham-
bers, and epistles signed by one or another ancient
Roman in the newspapers. Valens, and Curio, and
Decius and Marcus Brutus, might threaten North with
the fate of Strafford, and might solemnly remind a
shuddering public that there was such a date in the cal-
endar as the Thirtieth of January. But George the
Third knew perfectly well that his parliamentary ma-
jority was good for several sessions ; and that, if ever
the Rockinghams came into office, the very last thing
about which they would trouble themselves would be
the impeachment of their predecessors, or the punish-
ment of their monarch. He and his ministers might
continue to levy men and money with assured impunity
so long as they kept within the letter of the constitu-
tion, however little they might respect its spirit. Even
in a shire where three freeholders out of five were
against the war, the land-tax was paid to the last far-
thing ; the militia-ballot was peaceably conducted in the
105
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106 THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
Moot Hall of the county-town ; and the press-gang
gathered in the maritime population of the sea-ports at
the cost of a few more broken heads than usual. The
best of England's own citizens arraigned in words the
justice of her cause; but, when it came to deeds, she
presented to the contemplation of her rebellious chil-
dren the same unbroken front which had been so often,
and so impressively, displayed before a foreign enemy. 1
The case was different across the ocean. Political
power, so much as there was of it, rested in a collection
of individuals who called themselves a Congress; as
they might have called themselves a House of Com-
mons, or an Assembly of Notables, or, (if they were so
minded,) a Witenagemote. With less inherent authority
than a parish vestry, — for legal standing they had
none, — they issued recommendations to those of their
countrymen who were ready to accept their advice;
they lectured the British Cabinet with every circum-
stance of publicity; and they treated secretly with
foreign Courts which were rejoiced to see that Cabinet
in a scrape, and were willing to do much in order to
keep it embarrassed and enfeebled. Congress then,
and for many years after, was described by John
Adams as " not a legislative assembly, nor a representa-
tive assembly, but only a diplomatic assembly." 2 No
central authority existed in America. The local govern-
ments of the separate provinces were responsible for
the ordinary course of civil administration ; and those
governments, so far from being legally and duly con-
stituted, were not constituted at all.
1 " It really appears to roe that administration will proceed to such ex-
tremities as will terminate in the ruin of England and the colonies. It is
a capital mistake of our American friends to expect insurrections here.
There is not a shadow of hope for such an event. ... It is said most
vigorous measures will take place in the Spring, if no offer be made on
the part of the colonists." Letter by Samuel Curwen, the loyalist, from
London ; August 8, 1775.
2 A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of
America; by John Adams, LUX, and a Member of the Academy of
Arts and Sciences at Boston. London : printed for C. Dilly in The
Poultry ; M.DCC.LXXXVIL
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CONGRESS
107
The provincial Charters were now waste parchment.
The old constitutions had perished ; and in their place
was anarchy, tempered by the common-sense and public
spirit of the citizens. It has been said, by those who
love definitions, that the end and object of human insti-
tutions is to get twelve honest men into a jury-box, and
a rogue into jail. But here was a community without
judge or juryman, constable or turnkey. Society could
not have held together unless the colonists had been a
law-abiding people, or rather a people who abode in
reverential observance of a law which for the time was
extinct. But the population never existed whose princi-
ples of morality could long be proof against such a strain.
An event befell John Adams, trifling in itself, which
threw him into a reverie tinged by profound melan-
choly. He met on the road a common horse-jockey,
against, or in behalf of, whom he had often appeared in
court ; for the man had been always at law, and for the
most part in the capacity of a defendant. " As soon as
he saw me, he came up to me, and his first salutation
was; 'Oh! Mr. Adams, what great things have you
and your colleagues done for us ! There are no courts
of justice now in this province; and I hope there never
will be another.' ' Is this,' said I to myself, 1 the object
for which I have been contending? Are these the senti-
ments of such people ? And how many of them are
there in the country ?
That occurrence took place in the fall of the year
1775; and things were soon in the way of mending.
Many far-sighted, and all hot-headed, patriots were
eager to see the day when their country should de-
clare herself an independent nation. America could
not put forth her full strength at home, or acquire allies
on the Continent of Europe, as long as Americans were
content to style themselves subjects of the British Crown.
Most interesting were the communications which, dur-
ing that period of suspense and incubation, passed be-
tween members of Congress and their leading supporters
in the provinces. James Warren, the President of the
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108 THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
Massachusetts Assembly, thus addressed one of his rep-
resentatives at Philadelphia. "The sentiments of our
colony are more united on this great question than they
ever were on any other. Perhaps ninety-nine out of
one hundred would engage with their lives and fortunes
to support Congress in the measure. There is little left
to do but the form and ceremony ; but even that is im-
portant." General Charles Lee wrote as follows to
Richard Henry Lee of Virginia. "The pulse of Con-
gress is low. If you do not immediately declare for
positive Independence we are all ruined. There is a
poorness of spirit, and a languor, in the late proceedings
of Congress that I confess frightens me so much that at
times I regret having embarked my all, — my fortune,
life, and reputation, — in their bottom. I sometimes
wish I had settled in some country of slaves, where the
most lenient master governs." Arthur Lee despatched
from Paris to the Committee of Secret Correspondence,
whose emissary he was, a letter bound up within the
cover of a dictionary. He reported that the desire of
France to assist America was sincere, but that the Court
was timid, and the position of the Ministry precarious.
" My opinion is," he said, " that Independency is essen-
tial to your dignity, essential to your present safety, and
essential to your future prosperity and peace." 1
Such were the incentives by which ardent and anx-
ious partisans endeavoured to quicken the march of the
Revolution. But Congress, in those early days of the
struggle, was full of strong men who had no intention
of being hurried over a task the scope and gravity
of which they adequately measured. Although not
given to meaningless delay, they had their weighty
reasons for advancing with circumspection and on sys-
1 The dictionary in question was the key to a new cipher, worked by
putting the number of the page on which the word was to be found, and
indicating the word itself by a more complicated process. " I cannot,"
said the Commissioner, " use this until I know it is safe. You can write
to Mrs. Lee, on Tower Hill, in a woman's hand. If you have both honkf,
siv the children are well; if the first only, the eldest child is well; if this,
the youngest child b welL They will let this pass."
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CONGRESS
icg
tern. The aspiration after national independence, how-
ever widely prevalent now, was in the main a new
sentiment. The idea had long been familiar to Samuel
Adams, and a few like him ; but it had not begun to
pervade the people at large until a very recent date.
Before blood had been shed, and towns burned, and half
a score of petitions thrown into the royal waste-paper
basket, colonists of every shade in politics had scouted
as a libel the charge that they aimed at separation from
the mother country. So late as October 1 774 the First
Congress thus addressed the British people. "You
have been told that we are seditious, impatient of gov-
ernment, and desirous of independence. Be assured
that these are not facts, but calumnies." Among those
who voted that address was George Washington ; and
in the same autumn he told a military friend at Boston,
who had spoken of New Englanders as rebels, that it
was not the wish or the interest of Massachusetts, or
of any other colony, to set up for independence either
separately or collectively. Washington never romanced
to anyone; and, if Benjamin Franklin occasionally
practised duplicity, at any rate he always spoke the
truth to Lord Chatham. Franklin had resided in Eng-
land since 1765, and his experience of the bent of colonial
opinion was wanting in freshness ; but, such as it was,
that experience covered half a century. He informed
Lord Chatham that in the course of his life he had
travelled from end to end of the American continent,
had conversed with all descriptions of people, and had
never heard a hint from any individual, whether drunk
or sober, that Independence was desirable or even
imaginable.
Testimony to the same effect has been given by Jay,
and Madison, and by Jefferson and John Adams them-
selves, in vigorous and characteristic phrases which
have been collected and treasured by a people who
never tire of reading what their great men said about
the chief event in American story. But these were
colonists, educated amid an atmosphere of universal
IIO THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
loyalty to the Crown, who might be slow in noticing
the symptoms of a change in that public opinion by
which their boyhood and youth had been surrounded.
More conclusive, therefore, is a record of the impression
produced upon an Englishman belonging to the lower
middle class, who had been born in the heart of our
Eastern counties, and who had turned the corner of life
before he emigrated to the colonies. Thomas Paine
brought to the study of the American Revolution a
mind neither profound nor cultivated, but agile, vivid,
and impressible ; quick to see into things, and marvel-
lous in its power of stating them with lucidity, with live-
liness, and with incisive force. 1 " I happened," Paine
wrote, "to come to America a few months before the
breaking out of hostilities. I found the disposition of
the people such that they might have been led by a
thread, and governed by a reed. Their suspicion was
quick and penetrating ; but their attachment to Britain
was obstinate, and it was at that time a kind of treason
to speak against it. Their idea of grievance operated
without resentment ; and their single object was recon-
ciliation."
When the second Continental Congress met in May
1775 a change had passed over the mind of the Ameri-
can people. Their love of England was wounded
deeply at Lexington, and the events of the ensuing
autumn and winter had killed it outright. The party
of the Revolution outside Congress was already bent on
Independence ; but the assembly itself was divided on
the question, though in very unequal proportions.* When
the House first met, champions of the British connec-
tion were not many in number; but they were able,
wealthy, and respected ; and they enjoyed the great ad-
vantage of being on their own ground. Pennsylvania,
as the most populous colony, supplied the largest num-
ber of delegates to Congress. Most of them were luke-
1 This sentence is a verbal, though abbreviated, reproduction of Mr.
Tyler's admirable description of Paine in the twenty-first chapter of the
LiUrary History of the American Revolution.
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CONGKESS
III
warm patriots ; and some were greater Tories than they
themselves as yet knew. Enthusiasm was discounte-
nanced by the company with whom they habitually con-
sorted. Many leading gentlemen of Philadelphia had
been attached to the Proprietary Interest, and owed
their fortunes, and their municipal importance, to the
favour of the Penns; and the Penns were for the
Crown, although it had used them ill in the past, as
against the Revolution, which was sure to use them
much worse in the future. The Quakers, generally
speaking, had gone as far in the direction of resistance
to authority as their conscience sanctioned, and as their
tastes inclined them. Fond of comfort and security, and
knowing the income of every local politician, (which in
some cases was no great burden on their memory,) to
within a hundred dollars, they had scanty sympathy
with the less solvent personages who so often push to
the front in times of trouble. Their attitude towards
warlike members of their own body, who were very
seldom warm citizens in any sense except in that of
their revolutionary ardour, was illustrated by the anec-
dote of a rich and cautious Friend who chanced to
encounter a Free Quaker arrayed for battle. The old
man inquired as to the nature and object of the im-
plement with which his neighbour was girt, and learned,
in reply, that liberty or death was now the watchword
of everyone who meant to defend himself and his prop-
erty. " I had not," was the rejoinder, " expected such
high feelings from thee. As to property, I thought
thee had none ; and as to thy liberty, I thought thee al-
ready enjoyed it through the kindness of thy creditors."
The policy of hesitation gained dignity and popu-
larity from the adhesion of John Dickinson, the author
of the " Farmer's Letters." Dickinson had the virtues
and the social standing indispensable for the leader of
a middle party ; and his political creed was compounded
of such peculiar elements, and so sincerely and bravely
held, as to give him unusual influence at a very special
conjuncture. He was prepared to fight to the death
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1 1 2 THE AMERICAN RE VOLUTION
for the rights of America, and to die twice over rather
than consent to forswear his allegiance to the King.
A poorer motive was attributed to him by John Adams,
who never showed to so little advantage as when analys-
ing the character of a prominent contemporary. The
Quakers, (so Adams was told, and so he was willing to
believe,) had intimidated Dickinson's female relatives,
who continually distressed him with their remonstrances.
His mother kept telling him ; " Johnny, you will be
hanged. Your estate will be forfeited. You will leave
your excellent wife a widow, and your charming chil-
dren orphans, beggars, and infamous." " From my
soul," said Adams, " I pitied Mr. Dickinson. If my
mother and wife had expressed such sentiments to me,
I am certain that, if they did not wholly unman me
and make me an apostate, they would make me the
most miserable man alive." And then he went on to
enumerate a list of his connections on both sides, from
grandparents downwards, — names of the sort which
have ever since supplied Boston society with a very
passable substitute for a titled aristocracy, — and to
congratulate himself on the fact that they had one and
all uniformly been of his mind at every turn of the
great controversy ; so that, however loud the storm
might rage without, he had enjoyed perfect peace at
home.
Adams should have judged others by himself. If all
the Quincys and Nortons in Massachusetts had been
Tories together, it would not have abated a tittle of his
own patriotism ; and the resolution with which Dickinson
maintained his antiquated constitutional attitude was
proof against far severer trials than the tearful expostu-
lations of his family. Like a Puritan country gentleman
at the beginning of our Civil War, he held that to bear
arms against the Crown was consistent with the duty of
a loyal subject ; and a loyal subject he was determined
to remain. Clear and steadfast in his own views, he for
a while exercised a remarkable influence over others.
He kept his followers united and busy, and encouraged
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CONGRESS
"3
them to attract recruits from among their colleagues.
Working with great art and assiduity, they won over to
their own party the representatives from South Carolina.
A visible impression was produced even upon the Sacred
Band of the Massachusetts delegation, two of whom, in
a weak moment, had consented to bring their wives to
Philadelphia. These ladies were invited everywhere,
and visited by everybody; while their husbands, tired by a
long day's work, and with the cheerless alternative of
an evening in hired lodgings, gladly went where there
was a good cook, a choice cellar, and reception rooms
decorated with an abundance of those simple and beau-
tiful articles which now, under the title of old colonial
furniture, are the chief treasures of a genuine American
collector.
Strong courses were for the present unacceptable to
these butterflies of politics ; if such a term could be
applied to any New Englander. But even the more
severe statesmen of the popular party did not wish to
force the situation. An assertion of national indepen-
dence, extorted from Congress after protracted and
angry debates, and supported by anything short of an
overwhelming majority, would be of less than no value
for the high purposes which those statesmen had in
contemplation. Their sound policy was to wait for
unanimity ; and meanwhile, with excellent judgement,
they conceded to the chieftain of the royalists a provi-
sional, but very real, leadership in the conduct of their
assembly. There was no danger lest warlike prepa-
rations should suffer on that account ; because, in all
which related to the public defence, Dickinson was far
more ready to help than to impede. In September
1775 a secret Board of nine Congressmen was appointed
to contract for the importation of five hundred tons of
powder, forty brass field-pieces, ten thousand stand of
arms, and twenty thousand " good, plain, double-bridled
musket-locks ; " in the following November five mem-
bers were nominated to correspond "with friends in
Great Britain, Ireland, and other parts of the world ; "
PT. II.— VOL. I. I
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114 THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
and Dickinson sate on both those most important com-
mittees. With less expectation of a fruitful result, but
with a single-minded desire for it, Congress gave him a
free hand in his endeavour to conciliate England. He
was empowered to petition George the Third once
again ; to word the document in a style which he
thought would please ; and to entrust it to a messenger
chosen from that Proprietary Family of Pennsylvania
which had a nearer interest than the House of Bruns-
wick itself in staying the progress of the disturbances.
From this step, which Dickinson was permitted to take,
and to take exactly in his own way, nothing but good
could come. "There was not a moment during the
Revolution," (so John Adams wrote, years after that
Revolution was over,) "when I would not have given
everything I possessed for a restoration to the state
of things before the contest began, provided we could
have a sufficient security for its continuance." If
Penn's mission had succeeded, that ancient peace would
have been restored; and during the remainder of his
life Dickinson would have been the first man in Amer-
ica, and after death would have been regarded with
something of the veneration which now is paid to the
memory of Washington. And, if the result was other-
wise, (as those who had carefully watched the King
reluctantly foresaw,) the partisans of peace would them-
selves acknowledge that their remedy had been fairly
tried, and had hopelessly failed; and the doctrine of
non-resistance would thenceforward never be preached
except by politicians who were in favour of abject sub-
mission and unconditional surrender.
Adams, for a reason of his own, was just now not
sorry to be working unostentatiously and in the back-
ground. He had been overtaken by one of those dis-
agreeable incidents, — more odious to their victim in
the retrospect than grave calamities, — which an im-
pulsive and emotional man, who ventures into politics,
must sooner or later count on facing. A Boston advo-
cate, who had served his time as clerk in a Tory
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CONGRESS
115
lawyer's office, found or feared that nobody would
employ him at the bar ; and he accordingly prayed
John Adams to give him a certificate of patriotism.
Adams at last was teased into drawing up letters of
recommendation addressed to his own wife, and to
President Warren. When once his pen was in motion,
he allowed it to run. He wrote as he would have
talked in the presence of the two people whom he was
addressing, and poured himself out as plain as if, on
that July afternoon, he had been sitting between them
over a jug of cider in his verandah at Braintree. He
passed a jest on General Lee's devotion to a favourite
dog. 1 He inveighed against Dickinson in terms more
amusing indeed, but not a whit more slighting and
embittered, than those which many and many a states-
man, in his private correspondence, has employed when
writing about an antagonist. And, finally, he described
the labours of Congress in highly seasoned language
which, especially in the estimation of small critics, had
a flavour of the grandiose. " My anxiety," he told
Mrs. Adams, " about you and the children, as well as
our country, has been extreme. The business I have
had upon my mind has been as great and important
as can be entrusted to man, and the intricacy of it
prodigious. When fifty or sixty men have a Constitu-
tion to form for a great empire; a country of fifteen
hundred miles extent to fortify ; millions to arm and
train ; a naval power to begin ; an extensive commerce
to regulate; numerous tribes of Indians to negotiate
with; a standing army of twenty-seven thousand men
to raise, pay, victual, and officer, — I really shall pity
those fifty or sixty men."
It was very much what an over-worked man of
genius might be expected to write, during a scrap of
leisure, for the benefit of those who loved to hear him
discourse, without reserve, in obedience to the mood
1 " You observe in your letter the oddity of a great man. He is a
queer creature; but you must love his dogs if you love him, and forgive
a thousand whims for the sake of the soldier and the scholar."
1 2
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1 1 6 THE AMERICAN RE VOL UTION
which was upon him at the moment. But his confi-
dences were exposed to the ordeal of an unfair and
most unpleasant notoriety. The young lawyer, when
crossing Hudson River, was intercepted by the boats
of a British man-of-war; and he was fool enough not
to destroy the letters. Admiral Graves sent them to
the Governor of Boston, as a proof that the fleet under
his command had at least contrived to capture some-
thing ; and Gage, when it came to his turn, so forgot
himself as to publish them in the newspapers. General
Lee at once wrote to assure their author that, as far as
he himself was concerned, no mischief had been done.
He was pleased, he said, that his dog had got into
history ; and he did not object to be called a queer
creature, since in the same sentence his name had been
handed down to posterity as that of a soldier and a
scholar. Unfortunately there was more good sense,
and less sensitiveness, in the camp than in the Congress.
Though names had not been mentioned in the letters,
everybody detected the personage of great fortune, and
etty genius, "whose fame had been loudly trumpeted,
ut who had given a silly cast to the whole of the
doings " at Philadelphia. Dickenson cut Adams in the
street : and Dickinson's friends called him faithless
and slanderous because, in the postscript of a private
letter to his wife, he had complained that some among
the delegates were fidgety and conceited. But the
indignation professed to be felt over these trivialities
was a cloak for resentments more profoundly based.
Adams had written to President Warren that already,
had it not been for the timidity of certain folks, Amer-
ica should and would have been declared an indepen-
dent nation. That was his true crime. The opponents
of Independence saw their chance, and made haste to
ruin him. They accused him openly and clamorously
of being disloyal to his colleagues ; but they whispered
among themselves that he was a traitor to his King.
Mr. Adams, (so his grandson relates,) was shunned by
many as if it were contamination to speak with him.
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117
" Even of his friends, several became infected with the
general panic, and looked coldly upon him. At no
time, (and he had repeated trials of this kind,) did he
stand more in need of all his fortitude and self-control
than upon the occasion of this sudden and unlooked-for
influx of the general disapprobation." 1
Every intelligent reader in England took the inter-
cepted letters very seriously. They brought home to
him, as nothing had done before, the far-reaching char-
acter of those political problems which had been so
lightly and wantonly raised, and the stern purpose of
at least one rebel statesman, who was bound to solve
those problems on peril of his own life. The revela-
tions of the inner mind of John Adams extorted respect,
and even admiration, from enlightened adversaries of
his cause. Burgoyne, who could relish a literary style
the very opposite to that which he himself cultivated,
exclaimed that the American lawyer wrote with the con-
ciseness of Tacitus, and propounded matter for a vol-
ume in half a sentence. In something less than the
half of one of his own sentences, (for, in dealing with
Burgoyne, condensation must be permitted if he is to
be quoted at all,) the General called Lord Dartmouth's
attention to the acute and dangerous genius of Adams.
"The bare effort of investigating such objects argues
an aspiring and vigorous mind ; but when it is consid-
ered that, with a profligate character, — neither sup-
ported by pecuniary nor political interest, nor ascending
by the footsteps of any leader or patron, — by the exer-
cise of his parts he has cajoled the opulent, drawn in
the wary, deluded the vulgar, till all parties in America,
and some in Great Britain, are puppets in his string, I
am persuaded your Lordship will, with me, lose sight
of Catiline and Cromwell in passing judgement upon his
character. Be assured, my Lord, this man soars too
high to be allured by any offer Great Britain can make.
1 Life of Adams, by Charles Francis Adams the elder; chapter iv.
" I was avoided," (John Adams himself said,) " like a man infected with
the leprosy."
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1 1 8 THE AMERICAN RE VOL UT10N
America, if his counsels continue in force, must be sub-
dued or relinquished. She will not be reconciled." 1
Adams soon regained any ground which he might
have lost in Congress. The unpopularity of an honest
man, who has done an unlucky thing, is superficial and
transient ; however deeply in his own mind the sting
may rankle. For the work of the next twelvemonth
John Adams was indispensable ; and he could not be
gossiped and sneered out of the secure position which
he occupied in the confidence of his fellow-countrymen.
Ill suited to be chief of a party in ordinary times, "when
much depends on a spirit of accommodation to the whims
or the longings of individuals held together by fleeting
considerations of personal or public interest, he was emi-
nently qualified to stand forth the exponent of a clear,
strong, and noble plan of action in a time of danger." 2
So his descendant has judged him ; and it was an esti-
mate in no degree affected by family partiality. John
Adams could be politic and discreet for the attainment
of a great end ; and, when a national crisis pressed, he
would forego his own claims, forget his own grievances,
and do full justice to the merit of others. His strict
and pure morality, fortified by courage and industry,
gave him a commanding influence over an assembly so
limited in number that each member of it, whether
friend or enemy, knew him exactly for what he was.
His speeches were the mirror of his character ; and
each of them displayed that instinctive devotion to fixed
principles, and that solid comprehensive grasp of the
facts and particulars of the hour, which were his most
valuable qualities as an orator.
1 Coarser natures than Burgoyne thought it a fit opportunity to revive
those suggestions of hanging American statesmen which had helped to
provoke the rebellion. In the Dartmouth Manuscripts there is a letter
from a Virginian Tory in London to a Virginian patriot at Philadelphia.
" I pity," said the writer, " the poor ignorant People who must he sacri-
ficed by thousands to gratify the Pride and Ambition of that damned ras-
cal John Adams. If you become a separate State, I hope he will turn out
another Cromwell. If Gage does not raise him to a more exalted station,
he won't be contented with anything less from your hands than Stadt-
holder."
9 Life of John Adams; chapter iv.
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HQ
Those fireworks of declamation, by which American
freedom is annually celebrated, have dazzled mankind
into forgetting that the edifice of the great Republic
was not built up by rhetoric. The famous Virginian
speaker, Patrick Henry, has sometimes been repre-
sented as a type of the statesmen of the Revolution.
His contemporaries have handed down to us a tradition
of his idleness and want of method, founded on truth,
but not exempt from exaggeration. 1 Patrick Henry,
like most public men, had enemies; and he was singu-
larly unfortunate in his panegyrists. From them we
learn that he hated the toil of composition ; that he left
no manuscripts, and read very few books ; inasmuch as
he maintained, all through life, that men were the only
volumes which could be perused to advantage. His
library, (we are told,) was in his youthful days the bar
of his father's tavern. "The character of every cus-
tomer underwent his scrutiny ; not with reference either
to the integrity or solvency of the individual, in which
one would suppose that Mr. Henry would feel himself
most interested ; but in relation to the structure of his
mind, the general cast of his opinions, and what may
be called the philosophy of character." 2 From these
studies he emerged "the orator of nature; — one of
those perfect prodigies of whom very few have been
produced since the foundation of the earth was laid."
He spoke as Homer wrote. He was Shakspeare and
Garrick combined. His biographer in title describes
him as possessing a genius which designed with all the
boldness of Michael Angelo, and an imagination which
coloured with all the wealth of Titian. This author
1 The Journals of Congress, and Henry's own private fee-book, have
recently been subjected by Professor Tyler to a careful and intelligent ex-
amination; and they indicate that, both as lawyer and senator, the great
orator was more industrious and less unpractical than anecdote has repre-
sented him.
2 Sketches of the Life and Character of Patrick Henry, by William Wirt
learned at the tavern in his character of son of the house, at all events he
got little harm; for he was a water-drinker.
Whatever of value Henry might have
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120 THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
could find nothing in the material world wherewith to
compare his hero except the cataract of Niagara ; and
the book ends with a declaration, adapted from a better
writer, that we never shall look upon Patrick Henry's
like again.
Jefferson, — a critic of strong perception, and im-
mense experience, — pronounced Henry the greatest
popular speaker whom he ever heard. He was, indeed,
a marvellous orator ; and some of his phrases still ring
through the generations. It is therefore all the more
worthy of note that he was held of no great account in
the Continental Congress. His most devoted admirer
acknowledges that, when the war had fairly begun, and
the crisis demanded not words but work, it became
evident that Mr. Henry was no business-man. He
could not endure the labour of close thinking ; and the
lax habits of his early life had implanted in him an
unspeakable aversion to the drudgery of detail. 11 1
found Mr. Henry," said Jefferson, " to be a silent and
almost unmeddling man in Congress. On the original
opening of that body, while general grievances were
the topic, he was in his element, and captivated all by
his bold and splendid eloquence. But, as soon as they
came to specific matters, he had the good sense to
perceive that his declamation had no weight in an
assembly of cool-headed, reflecting, judicious men." And
so it came to pass that, a year before the Declaration of
Independence, Patrick Henry ceased to be a Member of
Congress, and never again took a seat upon the benches.
There seldom was an assembly which fixed its atten-
tion more obstinately upon realities, and listened less
greedily to the elegancies, the subtleties, and the
personalities of debate. Men repaired thither every
morning as to a scene of exertion where their own lives
and fortunes, and the future of their country, depended
on their common labours and their mutual forbearance.
Orators were at hand, if orators were wanted. Con-
spicuous among such was Richard Henry Lee, who
almost justified those hyperboles which, according to
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COXGRESS
colonial fashion, were then applied to a fine speaker.
His admirers called him the Cicero of the House. His
style, to their perception, bore a striking resemblance
to that of Herodotus. He required to read nothing
up, and to think nothing out, but was ready to handle
any subject as soon as it was announced ; u and his
speech was copious, mellifluous, and set off with be-
witching cadence of voice and captivating grace of
action." But with all that, and several pages more of
laudatory epithets, he had not a tithe of the influence
exercised by another public man who, like himself, came
from Virginia. Washington, too, had passed through a
political apprenticeship in the Assembly at Williamsburg.
His maiden speech was a single lame and broken sen-
tence, stammered out when he was thanked in his place
for distinguished military services rendered in the great
French war. Like all men of parts and courage, he
soon learned to command his faculties when addressing
his fellows; but he never wasted time and breath, or
appealed to the ear about a matter which could be
decided by the eye. He had been known to refute
a persuasive and passionate orator, on a question con-
cerning the appropriate site for a public building, by
producing a map from his pocket and indicating the
exact situation of the localities in dispute.
The four men who, in the earlier sessions of Con-
gress, had most share in guiding its deliberations and
moulding its action, were Washington and Franklin,
Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. Three out of the
four never made a speech as long as the very shortest
which, on an important evening, a front-bench man in
the House of Commons would think it compatible with
his dignity to make. " During the whole time," said
John Adams, " that I sate with Mr. Jefferson in Con-
gress, I never heard him utter three sentences together."
Washington very seldom exceeded ten minutes, nor
Franklin either ; — mindful, as the latter was, of what
he had written in Poor Richard's Almanack about " the
Orator, with his flood of words, and his drop of reason.* 1
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122 THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
Adams himself spoke extemporaneously, from stores of
information which he had made his own for reasons
other than oratorical, and ceased as soon as he had put
his audience in possession of the facts, and of the pro-
posals, with which it was essential that they should be
acquainted. The power of these men lay in what they
knew, and did ; and, above all else, in the circumstance
that their brother Congressmen gratefully recognised
how very much leisure, comfort, and private advantage
they had sacrificed under a sense of public duty. Wash-
ington, until he joined the army at Boston, sate on every
committee where his military experience was in demand.
Franklin, as soon as he returned from London to Phila-
delphia, afforded an example of diligence which his
younger colleagues were proud to follow. He was a
Chief Commissioner for Indian Affairs, and a member
of three bodies which sate every day, — the Committee
of Safety, the Pennsylvania Assembly, and the Conti-
nental Congress. When the hours, at which these
bodies severally met, interfered with each other, he
preferred to attend Congress ; not because the work
done there was more showy, but because it was more
urgent. And, as for Adams, from four in the morning
until ten at night he did not find a minute which he
could call his own. New Englander that he was, he
kept a pretty exact account, both in Colonial and British
money, of the value of the time which he gave to the
service of the State. There were lawyers, (he said long
afterwards,) who made five thousand guineas a year,
and many who earned ten thousand dollars; but not
one of them went through as much business for all his
emoluments as he himself had undertaken and dis-
charged during those eighteen months when he was
Chairman of the Board of War and Ordnance, and a
frequent and most weighty, although no lengthy, speaker
in the Continental Congress.
The Reverend William Gordon was a very familiar
figure in American political circles during that anxious
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THE REVEREND WILLIAM GORDON 123
and busy session. He was a Congregational minister
at Roxbury near Boston, and the self-destined historian
of the American Revolution. Piercing the mists of the
future with a confident glance, Gordon foresaw a theme
which demanded a Thucydides; and, as early as the
year 1774, he commenced to gather together his mate-
rials according to methods recommended by the practice
of that immortal writer. In order to qualify himself for
his large task, (we are told.) Gordon began by making
his purpose widely known.* He was in and forth of
Congress daily, jotting down the heads of speeches, and
button-holing the Committee-men who were the real
rulers of the country. He travelled up and down in
the wake of the armies, examining the ground where
actions had been fought, and plying the generals with
questions about the strength of their forces and the
meaning of their strategy. It was the function of his-
tory, (so Gordon wrote,) to oblige all who had performed
any distinguished part on the theatre of the world to
appear before mankind in their proper character, and
to render an account of their actions at the tribunal of
posterity, as models of what ought to be followed, or as
examples to be censured and avoided. 2 With such a
prospect before them, few commanding officers, who
had any care for their reputation, ventured to refuse
Gordon admission to the inmost recesses of head-quar-
ters. His principal informant on military matters was
General Gates, to whom he wrote as his " dear Horatio,"
in a long series of letters containing a good deal less
wit and insight than we are accustomed to associate
with observations addressed to a person of that name.
The Commander-in-Chief himself was persecuted by
Gordon with demands for private interviews, for a sight
of confidential documents, or for information on military
and political points of interest. The patience with
which, for many years, Washington endured this inflic-
tion was exemplary, and almost inexplicable. The truth
1 Ty ler's literary History ; Vol. II., chapter 39.
3 Preface to Gordon's History in the edition of 1788.
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124 THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
seems to be that the great Virginian, who knew his own
multifarious business well, was very cautious about
forming an unfavourable judgement with regard to the
qualifications of people who practised arts outside the
scope of his experience. He had no difficulty when
the question was one of selecting a brigadier-general, or
a Secretary of State, or an ambassador, or a land-agent,
or the foreman of a tobacco factory ; but he was con-
tent to accept historians at their own valuation, until
the world had pronounced a definite verdict upon their
merit
Gordon's head was perpetually filled by conscious-
ness of his high mission ; and he set an extravagant
value on the favour which he conferred by his bodily
presence. In the fall of 1776 he pompously announced
himself as intending a visit to both the armies. He did
not doubt, (he said,) that he would meet with a hearty
welcome from Gates and Washington, and see them in
the happy character of glorious conquerors, loved and
admired by all about them for having been instrumental
in saving the liberties, as well as the necks, of the
Americans. But there was one statesman in Philadel-
phia who never was sorry when the minister of Rox-
bury for a while transferred himself and his note-book
from the city to the camp. Parson Gordon's indiscreet
prate, (said John Adams,) was a mischievous element
in politics. Although zealous in the cause, and well-
meaning, he was an eternal talker, — vain, inaccurate,
and injudicious, and, (beyond all,) not sufficiently alive
to the claims and merits of the province of which Bos-
ton was the capital. 1 On that head Adams was hard
to please; for, sooner or later, Gordon was at the
trouble to read near thirty folio manuscript volumes of
the records of Massachusetts Bay.
But, in order to write like a great Athenian master in
the age of Pericles, something more was required than
diligence in collecting facts. Gordon, in an unhappy
hour, invented for himself the very worst historical
1 Diary of John Adams; November 16, 1775.
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THE REVEREND WILLIAM GORDON 125
vehicle that misdirected ingenuity ever constructed or
conceived. He composed his book in the shape of de-
tached letters professing to have been posted from
America, to correspondents in Europe, at dates immedi-
ately subsequent to the occurrences which they nar-
rated. By this process, (to employ his own exact
words,) he intended that a present ideal existence
of past events should be created in the mind, similar to
what is felt when a well-executed painting is examined. 1
A complete history, industriously composed on these
strange lines, was ready for publication as soon as the
war ended. But the author, on reviewing his work,
had come to the conclusion that America was far from
a safe place in which to publish. Gordon's fellow-citi-
zens were not just then in a mood to bear criticism
meekly, or to read with pleasure an impartial recapitu-
lation of events many of which they chose should be
forgotten. They were proud and exultant, and unwill-
ing to be reminded by a too faithful monitor how often
in the course of the war they had been foiled and dis-
pirited; not a few politicians and generals, moreover,
had risen to fame and power whose past career had
occasionally been marked by failures and blunders ; and
twenty continuous years of political commotion had
habituated the Americans to very rough modes of vin-
dicating public or private honour against anyone whom
they regarded as a traducer. Liberty, property, and
character, (so Gordon had persuaded himself,) were
1 Gordon, after reporting the famous outrage in Boston Harbor as a
piece of thrilling news, goes on to anticipate that the destruction of the
tea will issue in the destruction of the Provincial Charter, which will make
the inhabitants of the colony furious beyond expression. The letter re-
lating to what passed at Lexington is dated on the day week after the
battle. The account ends by expressing an apprehension that Massa-
chusetts will be crushed unless the other colonies come to her assistance.
Gordon's correspondent, however, would be interested to hear that, at all
events, the inhabitants of the threatened province will act their part with
firmness and intrepidity, knowing that slavery is worse than death. This
solemn trifling was kept up through four thick volumes, published many
years after the consequences, so gravely and specifically foretold as being
still in the future, had all come to pass.
126 THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
safer in Great Britain than in the States ; and the his-
torian could use the impartial pen with less danger in
the old Kingdom than in the new Republic. 1 He accord-
ingly resolved that his book should appear in London.
It was a desperate hope. The Americans might
be intolerant from the insolence of success; but the
British were very sore. When Gordon arrived on the
other side of the water, he was given to understand
that his story of the war abounded in statements which
the Law-courts at Westminster would regard as libels
on some of the most respectable characters in the
British army and navy ; that the Admiralty and the
War Office would never even contemplate the notion of
permitting him to examine their archives for evidence
to make good his allegations ; and that, if he possessed
the fortune of the Duke of Bedford, he would not be
able to pay the damages which would be recovered
against him. And so, having omitted what would give
umbrage to Americans, Gordon next proceeded to strike
out all that might offend Englishmen ; and his original
manuscript was docked of at least a hundred pages,
which were somewhat less dull and pointless than the
rest. Under such conditions Thucydides himself would
have failed to produce a work deserving to be classed
as a possession for ever: and, for poor Gordon, the
publication was not even a source of present profit.
John Adams, who then was Envoy at the Court of St.
James's, had some while before informed a friend at
home that neither history, nor poetry, nor anything but
painting and music, balls and spectacles, was in vogue
in London. Serious study had gone out of fashion ;
and, if ever people went back to books, they would not
begin with a narrative of the most disastrous under-
taking in which their country had for centuries been
engaged. " It is a story," (said Adams,) "that nobody
here loves to read." 2
1 Gordon to Horatio Gates; October 16, 1782.
a Gordon's pretensions, the docility with which they were recognised
by his countrymen while the history was still in preparation, and the utter
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THE PROVINCIAL GOVERNMENTS 1 27
The group of statesmen who, in 1775 and 1776,
inspired the tactics of the advanced party in Congress,
were disinclined to rush a declaration of Independence
against the resistance of what was still a compact and
not insignificant minority; but they had a stronger
reason yet for postponing a project on which, as an
alternative to surrender, their mind was now unalter-
ably set. As things then were, they did not feel them-
selves justified in committing their own generation, and
posterity likewise, to a step which would be ruinous in
case they failed, and irrevocable if they succeeded.
For Congress was a collection of individuals, sent to
Philadelphia by self-appointed constituents for the pur-
pose of making head against a great and sudden peril,
but with no right or title to construct a nation. In
order to approach such a scheme with moral authority,
and even a show of legality, the central assembly must
receive a definite and specific commission from the reg-
ular governments of the several colonies ; and at pres-
ent no such governments existed. The pedestal had to
be completed before the statue of liberty was erected ;
and the hewing out of each block of the granite which
composed the substructure was not less necessary, and
even tougher, work than the shaping of the marble.
To that work the craftsmen of the Revolution addressed
themselves boldly and betimes. On the third of No-
vember, 1775, Congress resolved that it be recommended
to the Provincial Convention of New Hampshire to es-
tablish such a form of government as in their judgement
would best produce the happiness of the people, and
most effectually secure peace and good order in the
Province, during the continuance of the present dispute
between Great Britain and the colonies. Next day the
same advice was given to South Carolina. Six months
elapsed; and in May 1776 Congress recorded its ear-
nest desire that any colony, which had not already pro-
collapse that followed its appearance, are notably illustrated by Washing-
ton's correspondence, as may be seen in the First Appendix at the end of
this volume.
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128 THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
vided itself with a new constitution, should forthwith
proceed to remedy the omission. " This resolution,"
said Adams, " I considered as an epocha, a decisive
event. It was a measure which I had pursued for a
whole year, through a scene and a series of anxiety,
labour, study, argument, and obloquy which was then
little known, and is now forgotten by all but a very
few." The ingratitude of oblivion is the common lot of
public men. Those are fortunate whose private com-
plaints and sorrows over the fickle memories of man-
kind never see the light; and happier still is he who
does not trouble himself about the matter at all.
Both before and after the Resolution of May 1776
the reorganisation of local government was going on
rapidly throughout the colonies ; and those proceedings
were extraordinarily impressive to English politicians
who watched them from across the ocean. There was
something very formidable in the coolness and determi-
nation of men who could thus legislate under fire. 1
Massachusetts, with her hands full, and the enemy in-
side her gates, had no time to spare for the niceties of
constitution-making, and pursued a short cut to freedom.
She contented herself with re-enacting, almost in block,
those ancient rights and privileges which the Parliament
at Westminster had temporarily extinguished; and it
may well be believed that no respect was paid to that
clause in the British statute which made the revival of
the Charter dependent on the gracious initiative of the
Crown. 3 Other New England colonies took the same
course as Massachusetts. They had lived under forms
of government so liberal that few and superficial changes
were needed in order to place them in a position to carry
on business as republics. In each province the King's
name disappeared from the headings of public Acts;
and provision was made for the discharge of functions
which hitherto had belonged to royal Governors who
had left their State-houses vacant, and who, under the
1 The Hon. C. J. Fox to I>ord Ossory; White'*, September 24, 1 776.
2 The American Revolution : Part I., chapter 5.
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THE PROVINCIAL GOVERNMENTS 129
existing circumstances, were in no hurry to re-inhabit
them. The new Constitutions of the Northern states
had nothing monarchical about them, except a solemn
announcement of allegiance to the King of Kings by
which their publication was generally accompanied ; but
on the other side of the Potomac supreme executive
power was for the most part entrusted to an individual.
South Carolina built up afresh from the foundation an
elaborate system, with a General Assembly, a Legisla-
tive Council of thirteen, a Privy Council of seven, and a
President whose assent was required before laws became
valid. Virginia, in her stately fashion, set forth the lines
on which she proposed to govern herself in a Declara-
tion of Rights, thoughtfully framed and nobly worded.
" No free Government," (so that instrument ran,) " can
be preserved but by a firm adherence to justice, mod-
eration, temperance, frugality, and virtue, and by fre-
quent recurrence to fundamental principles."
That last phrase would have had an ominous sound
if employed by men of certain other races. There have
been republics in the Southern continent of America
where recurrence would be had to fundamental prin-
ciples every time that the party in opposition had
scraped together enough dollars to purchase a few
thousand muskets. But the Virginian Declaration of
Rights was faithfully and literally construed by all who
gave it their adherence. On the abstract doctrines
therein laid down was founded a system of government
which called forth the enduring affection of a proud
and steadfast population. Eighty-five years afterwards,
— when in 1861 the South seceded from the Union,
and a controversy, insoluble except by arms, arose
between the State of Virginia and the central admin-
istration, — it became evident that the Old Dominion,
in the view of a vast majority of its citizens, had a
first claim on their loyalty. And so it was from the
very commencement. The generation which made the
American Revolution witnessed a brilliant proof that
the local patriotism of Virginians was already an ab-
pt. 11. — VOL. 1. K
130 THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
sorbing and sufficing passion. Patrick Henry, — who
always drew force and purpose from contact with his
native soil, where his early triumphs had been won, —
took a part in creating a constitution for Virginia, and
was chosen her Governor. That office he filled so
often that there was some excuse for French officers
in the allied army who addressed him on the cover of
their letters as His Royal Highness. 1 At such times as
he was not the chief ruler of his State, Henry preferred
to all other honours that of remaining one of her pri-
vate citizens. In after years, as a notability of the
Revolution, he had only to choose between the elevated
employments which were pressed upon his acceptance.
He was appointed to the Senate of the United States ;
and he declined to serve. Washington offered him
successively the great posts of Secretary for Foreign
Affairs, and Chief Justice of the whole country ; but he
refused them both. The political party of his adoption
urged him eagerly, and all in vain, to have himself put
forward as candidate for the Vice- Presidency in succes-
sion to John Adams. He lived to the end at his home
in Virginia ; — pleading causes in her law-courts ; and
electrifying her public meetings, on rare and momentous
occasions, by outbursts of an eloquence to which ad-
vancing years added dignity, while they did not quench
its fire.
The more deliberate, — or in some cases, it may be,
the half-hearted, — among the colonies were occupied
during many months in perfecting their organic laws.
It was not till April 1777 that New York, last of the
thirteen, promulgated her Constitution. Nevertheless
at a much earlier date the event had justified those
statesmen who insisted that the national fabric should
be built up in solid layers of masonry from below.
When once the problem had been solved of converting
each separate colony into a self-governed and indepen-
dent state, it followed as an axiom, intelligible even to
the humblest and worst educated citizen, that a federa-
1 Tyler's Patrick Henry ; chapter xvi.
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THE PROVINCIAL GOVERNMENTS 13 1
tion composed of those states must be emancipated
from external control. John Adams, in a string of
precise and homely sentences, had sketched out the
course which the Revolution thenceforward was bound
to follow. " A few important subjects," (he wrote to
his friend William Cushing,) M must be despatched
before I can return to my family. Every colony must
be induced to institute a perfect government. All the
colonies must confederate together in some solemn
bond of union. The Congress must declare the colonies
free and independent States ; and ambassadors must be
sent abroad to foreign courts, to solicit their acknow-
ledgement of us as sovereign states, and to form with
them, at least with some of them, commercial treaties
of friendship and alliance. When these things are once
completed, I shall think that I have answered the end
of my creation, and sing my nunc dimittis, return to
my farm, ride circuits, plead law, or judge causes, just
which you please."
That programme was played out to the last letter.
On the twelfth of April, 1776, the Convention of North
Carolina expressly ordered its representatives in Con-
gress to join in a declaration of Independence. Massa-
chusetts and Rhode Island next renounced their fealty
to the Crown ; and on the fifteenth of May the Conven-
tion at Williamsburg directed their delegates at Phila-
delphia to propose separation from Britain, and
communicated that resolve to the other colonies in a
circular letter. All through June the provincial assem-
blies were declaring their concurrence with the course
taken by Virginia. Connecticut acceded, and New
Hampshire, and Maryland. New Jersey, cautious in
theory, drafted her Constitution in such a form as not to
exclude the possibility of a reconciliation with the Crown ;
but at the same time she gave a very practical indication
of her sentiments by throwing the royal Governor into
prison, and intimating to her delegates that they had
better " pass the Rubicon, and vote plump." 1 Delaware
1 Letter of Jonathan D. Serjeant from Burlington ; June 15, 1776.
K2
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132 THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
still hesitated ; and the adhesion of New York to the
party which favoured uncompromising and immediate
action was of an informal character. South Carolina and
Georgia had issued instructions to their representatives
which implied a recognition of national independence,
without directly naming the word. The Georgian con-
gressmen, who were patriots to the core, found the
terms of their commission quite explicit enough for their
guidance ; but the South Carolinian delegates were back-
ward in the cause of the Revolution, and would not stir
an inch unless they were given a lead by Pennsylvania.
«
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CHAPTER V
THE PENNSYLVANIAN REVOLUTION. "COMMON SENSE."
THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE
Pennsylvania was passing through a political crisis,
the issue of which had a dominating effect upon the
future of America. The colony extended across what
was then, to all intents and purposes, the whole con-
tinent, from Lake Erie to Delaware Bay. Her western
territories afforded abundant room, and a hearty wel-
come, for emigrants in any multitude and of every
nationality. Her eastern districts were well populated
and carefully tilled, and replete with accumulated wealth,
and a solid comfort which in some cases had begun to
assume the aspect of luxury. Commanding the land-
ways and waterways then habitually in use, Pennsyl-
vania could connect, or separate, at pleasure the group
of Southern colonies on the one hand, and New York
and New England on the other. But the material ad-
vantage which she could bring, or refuse, to the Revo-
lutionary cause was small as compared with the moral
effect of whatever action she chose to take at this pre-
cise juncture in American history.
It is difficult to over-estimate the influence neces-
sarily exercised upon a great national movement by
the city in which the earlier stages of that movement
are conducted. The attitude of Philadelphia in 1775
and 1776 had an importance, not so great indeed in
degree, but the same in kind, as the attitude of Lon-
don during the first sessions of the Long Parliament, and
of Paris between the meeting of the States General and
the fall of the Directory. A handful of strangers, lodg-
•33
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134 THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
ing wherever they can find shelter in the various quar-
ters of a large town ; dependent on its hospitality ;
unable to escape the contagion of its enthusiasm, or
withdraw themselves from the alarming consequences
of its paroxysms of excitement; hooted or cheered up
to the very portals of the senate-house, and only too
glad if they are allowed to deliberate, safe and uninter-
rupted, within the precincts ; — the makers of a revolution
would be more than human if they did not come to re-
gard the local opinion immediately surrounding them
as the general opinion of the nation. It is true that
Congress was not exposed to insult or impertinence, ■
and still less to open violence. Philadelphia respected
herself, and honoured her guests; but the threescore
delegates, who lived scattered up and down among her
thirty thousand inhabitants, could not preserve them-
selves from being sensibly affected by her political
atmosphere. It mattered to them much what were the
inclinations of the province and the provincial capital,
and whether a Constitutional machinery existed for
making those inclinations felt.
The Pennsylvanian Assembly, which held its sittings
within a few yards of the hall where Congress met, 1
was not in sympathy with the Revolution. In that
Assembly the Quakers had no longer, as of old, a ma-
jority ; but their power was still great out of all propor-
tion to their numbers. Twenty years before, when the
Friends were reckoned at forty thousand, or about a
sixth part of the population resident within the colony,
twenty-eight assemblymen, in a total of thirty-six, were
members of their body. But in 1756, for a most hon-
ourable reason, they deliberately renounced their mo-
nopoly of the representation. The Governor and Council
had embarked upon an Indian war which according to
the Quakers was unjust, and waged it after a fashion
l4, The Pennsylvania assembly in 1775 gave up its room, (now Inde-
pendence Hall,) East of the main Entrance of the State House, to the
Continental Congress, and moved across to the West side, to the Judges'
Room ; where I believe it finished its existence." Letter to the author
from the President of Haverford College, Pennsylvania.
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THE PENNS YL VANIAN RE VOL UTION 1 3 5
which, even to others than Quakers, appeared to be
inhumane. Many of the more rigid Friends could not
find it within their consciences to vote taxes that in their
view were wickedly misspent, and resigned their places
in the Assembly. The void was filled by Episcopalians
attached to the party of the Proprietors; for the de-
scendants of William Penn, (with as little sense of his-
toric fitness as was displayed by Queen Christina, the
daughter of Gustavus Adolphus, when she became a
Roman Catholic,) had for the most part gone over to
the Church of England. A standing contention existed
between the Friends and the governing family; and
Franklin had commenced his ten years' mission to Eng-
land in the character of an emissary charged to make
interest with the Ministry and Parliament in London
against the claims and pretensions of the Proprietors.
But in 1772 the murmur of an approaching revolution
warned the two parties, which ruled Pennsylvania, to
sink their differences, and combine in defence of insti-
tutions no change in which could by any possibility
tend to profit, or aggrandisement, for either of them.
They already held between them most of the property
in the colony, and all the privileges. The Friends,
moreover, thought it wrong to fight with anybody ;
and the Proprietary family and their adherents were
altogether averse to bearing arms against the Crown.
An assembly so composed, and with such proclivi-
ties, found the leader that suited it in John Dickinson.
Born of Quakers, — and as prosperous, as virtuous, and
as order-loving as the best of them, — he hung loosely
on the Society, and was regarded by its members as
an eminent and respected man of the world, whose
aberrations from their strict rule they did not feel called
upon to reprehend. Writing, not in Quaker language,
he had opposed Townshend's financial policy with
closely reasoned prose, and in spirited verse which was
read or chanted by everyone who objected to the tea-
duty. As a poet, Dickinson was trammelled by the
difficulty of expressing in a popular chorus the precise
136 THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
constitutional relations which ought to exist between
American tax-payers and the British Treasury ; 1 but
the " Farmer's Letters " had deservedly established
his fame, at home and abroad, as a literary champion
of colonial rights. Those rights he was willing to
defend sword in hand, or, (if his countrymen would not
trust him with a command,) gun at shoulder; but all
that large class who were partisans of royalty, without
venturing so to declare themselves, felt a comfortable
assurance that hostilities, with Dickinson as war-minis-
ter, would not be ruinous to the interests of the Crown.
By April 1776 revolutionary feeling had grown so
hot in the colony that it became necessary for the
Assembly to make a demonstration of patriotism ; and
a course was adopted which in Dickinson's view was
righteous, and to his followers appeared comparatively
innocuous. Under his inspiration a bill was passed
increasing the members of the Pennsylvania legislative
body by seventeen, in order that those new ideas, which
had become prevalent since the last general election,
might find spokesmen within the walls. A Resolution
was carried, — which the Quakers could not support,
but were well able to obey, — approving the military
association of all who had no scruples against bearing
arms. Three battalions of regular infantry, and a large
issue of paper money, were voted; and then it was
decided by a great majority to maintain unaltered the
instructions which, from the very first, had been
imposed upon the Pennsylvanian delegates in the
Continental Congress. The last paragraph of those
instructions was conceived as follows : " Though the
oppressive measures of the British Parliament have
compelled us to resist their violence by force of arms,
yet we strictly enjoin you that you, in behalf of this
colony, dissent from and utterly reject any proposition
1 " In Freedom we're born, and in Freedom we'll live.
Our purses are ready,
Steady, friends, steady!
Not as slaves, but as freemen, our money we'll give."
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THE PENNSYL VAN J AN RE VOL UTION 1 3 7
that may cause, or lead to, a separation from our
mother-country, or a change in the form of this gov-
ernment"
Dickinson's political platform was too narrow, and
too delicately balanced, to accommodate any large part
of the heterogeneous population which swarmed in
Pennsylvania. In the seventeenth century three thou-
sand Germans, who had escaped from French barbari-
ties in the Palatinate, had found their way to America.
Repulsed from other colonies, they were accepted with
open arms by a community which had learned tolerance
and generosity from the precepts and example of its
founder. Securely planted in the rural districts of
Pennsylvania these fugitives attracted thither a con-
stant stream of industrious workmen, and good Protes-
tants, from Suabia and Switzerland. The German
immigrants were soon counted by scores of thousands.
Unambitious, and not so sure of their English as to
venture on airing it in debate, they did what gratitude
bade them, and very generally sent a Quaker to the
Assembly as their representative. They took this
course the more readily because, being mostly poor and
always thrifty, they trusted the Friends as economical
administrators of the provincial finances. But of late
years the case was altered, and the same motives of
parsimony made German farmers intensely hostile to
the claims of the British exchequer. Those claims,
(said one who knew Pennsylvania well,) very forcibly
appealed to the pocket, and impelled the great body of
foreign settlers to side with the patriots. "And as for
the genuine sons of Hibernia, it was enough for them
to know that England was the antagonist." 1
Those sons constituted a large and extremely formid-
able family ; — although their genuineness as Hiber-
1 Memoirs of a Life chiefly passed in Pennsylvania within the Last
Sixty Years; Edinburgh, 1822. Much curious, and quite unprejudiced,
information on the lighter aspects of the American troubles, and on the
composition of both armies in the war, may be found in this volume,
which was edited, with a preface of warm appreciation, by no less a writer
than John Gait.
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138 THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
nians would have been disputed by Roman Catholics in
the south of their native island ; for they were Scotch-
Irish from Ulster. With both the ruling sects of the
colony they maintained an irreconcilable feud. Their
fathers and grandfathers had been driven across the
seas by the vexatious treatment, petty in all but its in-
sanity, which as Presbyterians they had endured at the
hands of Bishops of the Established Church in Ireland.
And, again, the memories of ancient persecution stood
between them and the Quakers ; although in that case
the relation was inverted. Presbyterians had been
tyrannised over by Episcopalians in Tyrone and London-
derry; but the Friends had suffered cruelly, both in
England and Massachusetts, from the peculiar antipathy
with which they were regarded by Presbyterians. That
antipathy originally sprang from a controversy about
one of those theological points which formerly men
thought vital, but which are meaningless now. Already
in 1776 people required, in order to hate each other,
something besides a divergence of view about the ques-
tion whether, or not, there was a limitation to the effect
of Saving Grace; but Quakers and Presbyterians in
Pennsylvania had a more recent and acute motive for
mutual dissatisfaction. The Scotch-Irish to the west
of the Susquehanna resided, isolated and armed, on
farms which they themselves had cleared ; and they had
no defence against a raid of savages except their own
vigilance and courage. A fierce and resolute race, they
lived not indeed in the fear, but in the contemplation,
of a probability that their families might be butchered,
and the fruits of their labour destroyed, in the course of
one bloody night. It was hardly in human nature, —
it most certainly was not in theirs, — to feel charity
towards such an enemy. To the Quaker, in his beauti-
ful country-seat among the groves which skirted Phila-
delphia, the red man presented himself in the light of a
distant and appropriate object for evangelising efforts ;
but the proverbial saying that the only good Indian was
a dead Indian, (a grim doctrine which cut at the very
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THE PENNS YL VAN/AN REVOLUTION 1 39
root of missionary enterprise,) represented the creed of
all but a few among the backwoodsmen. For these
reasons there was no love in Pennsylvania between the
Ulstermen and the partisans of the Crown; and, as
soon as a quarrel arose against the Crown itself, the
Presbyterians of the western districts were revolu-
tionists almost to a man. The German settlers in
America, — when once emancipated from the stringent
military obligations which they leave behind them at
home, — have not shown themselves a particularly mar-
tial people ; but the North Irish colonists had brought
over with them an ineradicable conviction that opinions
worth holding were worth fighting for. A record has
been preserved of the nationalities in a company of
Pennsylvanian volunteers which marched to join the
army of Washington. Out of seventy-three privates,
two were from Germany, twenty from Ireland, and six
from Great Britain ; while forty-five enlisted under the
designation of Americans.
Among those Americans some were Quakers ; though
they did not remain Quakers long. There was search-
ing of heart, and trying of spirit, for all brave men in
America ; and of such the Society in the main consisted.
The early history of the Friends is one long record of
invincible fortitude displayed in the presence of atro-
cious malevolence and unsparing ridicule. Theirs was
a courage of the sort which the world calls passive, and
not active. The distinction is an idle one ; for nobody
who has seen the Friends working in the thick of
a famine or a fever, directing the operations of the life-
brigade on a stormy sea-coast, or immersed in the heat
and turmoil of a contested election, will ever doubt that
they are potentially the keenest of fighters. The Penn-
sylvanian Quakers, who belonged to the popular party,
found themselves in a grave predicament; for they had
to resolve whether they would stand idle and unarmed
at a time when the country of their selection was in
danger. A considerable number of them rallied to the
defence of the Revolution, and were expelled from the
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140 THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
Body as persons unfaithful to its principles. Their
cases were considered at the Monthly Meetings in the
city of Philadelphia; and all who furthered, or even
remotely abetted, warlike proceedings lost their birth-
right in the Society. Recreant Friends were "dis-
owned " by dozens and scores on a great variety of
charges; — for assuming a military appearance; for
joining the American army, and attending a stage-play ;
for fitting out an armed vessel ; for making weapons of
war to the destruction of their fellow-men; for being
in an engagement where many were slain ; for selling
prize rum which their relatives had captured when
privateering. As against four hundred, who were faith-
fully dealt with on account of help given to the Ameri-
can cause, twenty only were punished for taking open
part with the British. That disproportion in the num-
bers of the outcasts by no means represented the bal-
ance of political opinion in the Society. Quakers who
were Patriots had a much stronger motive for declaring
themselves partisans than Quakers who were Loyalists.
People must be audacious, busy, and much in evidence
if they desire to help on a revolution ; whereas a man
may do something to hinder one who stays quietly at
home, grumbling against the members of the provisional
government, throwing difficulties in the way of their
tax-gatherer, and refusing to pay for a substitute in the
militia until his bed is sold from under him. 1
That was the course taken by the great majority of
Quakers ; and the neighbours among whom they lived
were at no loss to interpret the inward sentiments which
their attitude betokened.' Paine roundly called them
dishonest respecters of persons, who addressed all their
1 A Quaker, drawn for the militia, was bound to see his goods actually
seized and sold, under pain of disownment. That penalty was inflicted
on one offender for " Purposely placing money before a person who was
about seizing his effects to satisfy a fine imposed on him in lieu of military
service," and on another for " Countenancing the payment of a demand
for the releasing of his cow."
9 "The official position was one of neutrality; but individually the
Friends could hardly be neutral. It seems almost certain that the men
of property and social standing in Philadelphia, like the wealthy mer-
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THE PENNSYLVANIA/* REVOLUTION 141
sermons about the wickedness of war to one party in
the quarrel. " If," he cried, " ye really preach from
conscience, and mean not to make a political hobby-
horse of your religion, convince the world thereof by
proclaiming your doctrine to our enemies ; for they like-
wise bear arms. Give us proof of your sincerity by
publishing it at St. James's. Preach repentance to
your King; and do not spend your partial invectives
against the injured and insulted only, but, like faithful
ministers, cry aloud and spare none." The Quakers,
however, had no mind to rebuke their Sovereign ; with
whose proceedings, indeed, they were very fairly satis-
fied. On First Month Twentieth, 1776, the Meeting
for Sufferings, — a council hardly inferior in weight and
authority to the Legislative Assembly of the Colony, —
issued a general address defining the position of the
Friends. The closing paragraph of this document ex-
pressed unqualified abhorrence of all such writings and
measures as indicated a design to break off the happy
connection hitherto enjoyed with the Kingdom of Great
Britain, and to impair the just and necessary subordina-
tion to the King and those who were placed in authority
under him.
The creed formulated in these antique phrases was
very little to the taste of all, or most, Philadelphians.
When the news of Lexington had arrived in the city,
the flame of patriotism blazed hot and high. Two
thousand volunteers were soon at drill. Townsmen as
they were, they knew the use of their limbs and their
weapons ; for manly exercises had long been of great
account in the community. Philadelphians enjoyed
every facility for becoming expert swimmers and oars-
men ; they prided themselves, with some show of reason,
on being the most elegant skaters in the world ; and,
chants of New York and Boston, were loyalists, though in their case
passively so." That is the account given by Mr. Isaac Sharpless, the
President of Haverford College, in his History of Quaker Government in
Pennsylvania. Mathieu Dumas, bringing a fresh mind from France, very
soon detected that "the Quakers, with an outward show of indifference,
at the bottom of their hearts inclined towards the party of the King."
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142 THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
when a lad was in cash, his first thought was to buy
powder and shot, and hire a skiff in which to hunt duck
and water-rail along the sedgy banks, and among the
reed-clad islets, of the Delaware. The enthusiasm of
war was not confined to the less wealthy classes. One
company of light infantry went by the title of the
Quaker Blues. Another, recruited! from the gilded
youth of a town where gold was in plenty, called them-
selves the Greens, and were spoken of by everybody
else as the Silk Stockings. The frugality and austerity,
which had been the fashion in New England ever since
the outbreak of the Revolution, took a modified form
in the easy-mannered capital of Pennsylvania. There,
we are told, the serious aspect of affairs brought tem-
perance into vogue ; and, instead of frequenting tavern
suppers, young men of family generally spent their even-
ings among their female acquaintance. They flirted
more, and drank less; but even so their abstinence
stopped short of asceticism. The captain of the Green
Company owned a noted cellar; and "capacious demi-
johns of Madeira " were set out in the court-yard where
his men mustered, for their refreshment before march-
ing to parade. It was a jolly time ; in marked contrast
to the hardships that were in store for them all, and to
the humiliations of defeat and captivity which soon be-
fell very many among their number.
The worse educated and more boisterous votaries of
the Revolution could not repress their pugnacity until
they had an opportunity of displaying it on the field of
honour. In Philadelphia, as elsewhere, they carried on
irregular and most unchivalrous hostilities against those
who disagreed with them. One Tory lawyer received
a box with a halter coiled inside it. Another, who no-
ticed a volume entitled Trials for High Treason on a
bookseller's counter, "asked the gentleman who kept
the store whether it would not be a proper book for Mr.
Adams to peruse." Next day the unfortunate loyalist
was carted round the streets, and only escaped worse
treatment on account of the meekness with which, at
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THE PENNSYL VANIAN REVOLUTION 143
every stopping-place on the route, he thanked the
crowd for their forbearance and civility. He was the
father of Leigh Hunt. In 18 13 the son paid a heavy
penalty for bantering an elderly Regent ; and the father,
in 1776, had found it not less dangerous to laugh at an
infant, or rather an embryo, Republic. Physicians, as
usual, were allowed to think as they pleased without
being molested ; but even they were expected to repay
lenity by discretion. Doctor Kearsley, who talked loud
in disparagement of the Revolution, and was most in-
consequently suspected of plotting secretly against it,
was seized by a party of militiamen, and hustled, bleed-
ing and indignant, into " the Tory cart." His profes-
sion was so far respected that he escaped being tarred
and feathered, and was supplied with as much punch
as he wished to drink. The poor man, however, did
not long survive his ride, and died with a mind dis-
ordered by the shock.
The only conceivable excuse for these detestable
practices was that they were perpetrated by men who
had no voice in deciding into which scale of the balance,
at a supreme national crisis, the vast weight of their
native province should be thrown. In May 1776 the
additional members of the Pennsylvanian assembly fell
to be chosen ; but the electorate was narrow, and in no
sense entitled to speak for the colony. The franchise
was denied to every man who could not show fifty dol-
lars. Many thousand Germans, zealots for liberty,
were not allowed to vote unless they were naturalised ;
and they could not be naturalised without taking the
oath of allegiance to the King. Many hundred ener-
getic politicians were fighting in Canada, or living in
tents at the military stations along the Hudson river,
while civil power was left " to the timid who remained
at home." 1 The Proprietary party easily held their own
at the poll in the country districts ; and only one Patriot
was returned among the four representatives allotted to
the capital.
1 Bancroft : Vol. V., page 240, of the Centenary edition.
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144 THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
Multitudes of excellent citizens, who had never soiled
their hands by participation in terrorism and outrage,
had looked forward to the election as a slender chance
of bringing constitutional pressure to bear upon the
action of the Assembly ; and that hope was now gone.
The prospect was indeed appalling. Far the largest
army that had ever been sent across the ocean by the
most powerful nation in the world was drawing near
their shores from day to day. Hordes of foreign mer-
cenaries had already been enrolled for their destruction ;
and the supply would never be exhausted as long as
there was a venal prince in Germany, or until the British
Treasury had lost credit to borrow. On every frontier
the savages were waiting, armed and painted, until
their Great Father should speak the word which would
turn them loose upon his disobedient sons and daughters.
Populous and flourishing seaside places had been laid
in ashes under orders, still in force, which expressly
enjoined that towns should be destroyed at that season
of the year when the houseless inhabitants would suffer
the most severely. And, — more alarming than all be-
sides, — a humble petition, dictated, (it is true,) by a
well-wisher of the King, but subscribed by the most
eminent among the opponents of the King's policy,
had elicited no response. That ominous silence had
been broken only for the purpose of proclaiming that
every colonist who took a part in the civil government
of America, or who aided its defence, was a rebel and
traitor, liable, just as much as in days of old were the
fugitives from Sedgemoor or Culloden, to the extreme
penalty of the law.
Those were the circumstances under which the voice
of Pennsylvania was stifled, and her sword-arm para-
lysed. It was a situation like that of France in August
and September 1792, when the terror and wrath of a
threatened and bewildered people deluged Paris with
blood, and blackened history with a stain which time
will never efface. But the Philadelphians of 1776,
though exposed to the same trials and temptations,
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THE PENNS YL VANIA N REVOLUTION 1 45
comported themselves in a manner which left nothing
to regret. A population of Englishmen, and Northern
Irishmen, they were not inclined to sit quietly down,
and wait for the day when they would learn which of
them were to be hanged, and which pardoned. It was
a work of necessity to disentangle themselves from the
trammels of the existing Constitution ; but they set
about that work decently and in order. No life was
taken ; no store was plundered ; not a coat was torn,
or a pane of glass broken. There assembled in the
State-house yard a crowd too large to count, and
guessed by various witnesses at from four to seven
thousand householders. It was nothing more nor less
than an exceptionally large Town-meeting. The gentle-
men who summoned it had defined their position in a
spirited manifesto, putting forward no official claims to
public obedience, but describing themselves as watch-
men for the province, who perceived, and were prepared
to combat, the dangers of the hour. 1 The meeting
unanimously voted that the Instructions issued by the
Assembly to their delegates in the Continental Congress
were of a nature to withdraw Pennsylvania from a
happy union with other colonies. It was then moved
that the present House of Assembly, not having the
authority of the people for that purpose, could not,
without usurpation, proceed to form a new government
for the province. From that proposition only one per-
son dissented ; and the Committee of the City and
Liberties of Philadelphia was accordingly directed to sum-
mon a conference of the committees of every county in
the province, and to make arrangements for a Constituent
Convention, which should be chosen by the people.
1 " Friends and fellow-countrymen, the question before you is short
and easy. You will be called upon to declare whether you will support
the Union of the Colonies in opposition to the Instructions of the House
of Assembly, or whether you will support the Assembly against the Union
of the Colonies. We have declared for the former; and we will at the
hazard of our lives support the Union. We have been open in our affairs.
The sense of this city hath been publicly taken, and we will not be belied
by Tories. Our situation makes us a kind of sentinels for the safety of
the Province." American Archives: Series IV., Vol. VI.
FT. II.— vol, I. L
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I46 THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
That day extinguished the self-confidence and self-
respect of the Pennsylvanian Assembly. Its sittings
thenceforward were infrequent, and its proceedings nu-
gatory. The members gladly found engagements which
kept them elsewhere ; and, when a quorum was obtained,
they could resolve upon nothing more dignified than
neither to advise, nor forbid, a Declaration of Indepen-
dence, inasmuch as they trusted " the ability, prudence,
and integrity " of their delegates. That trust was not
shared by the majority of their countrymen. On the
eighteenth of June the committees of Philadelphia, and
of the several counties, met in a provincial conference ;
and the Legislative Assembly made its final exit from
the political stage. The members confessed, in a for-
mal vote, their despair of being able to attend in
sufficient numbers for the due discharge of business.
They adjourned for a couple of months ; and the
announcement of the adjournment was intended, and
accepted, as an abdication. The provincial conference
was held in Carpenter's Hall; a fine, simple, brick
building, with a bold pediment and a deep cornice, most
appropriate for the sober, durable work which was
being done within. There, at all events, no difficulty
arose about a quorum. In the presence, and with the
approbation, of a hundred and four members, the
government of the colony was declared incompetent,
and a new one was ordered to be formed on the
authority of the people only. For the purpose of
obtaining that authority it was determined to revive
William Penn's "Great Law" of December 1682, and
to confer upon every tax-payer the right of voting to
elect a convention charged with the duty of making a
reformed Constitution for Pennsylvania; and, before
another week was out, "the Conference, with perfect
unanimity, all its members giving their voices one by
one, pronounced their willingness to concur in a vote of
Congress declaring the united Colonies to be free and
independent States." 1
1 Bancroft ; Vol. V., page 309. The proceedings of the Assembly, and
of the conference, are recorded at length in the American Archives,
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COMMON SENSE"
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The Pennsylvanian revolution had been accom-
plished ; and meanwhile the larger movement was
rapidly approaching to its consummation. A pro-
digious impulse had of late been given to the national
sentiment of the colonies by a colonist of such recent
adoption that he had been an Englishman for twice as
many years as he had been an American for months.
Paine emigrated to Philadelphia at the end of 1774,
bearing a letter of introduction from Doctor Franklin
which described him as an ingenious worthy young man.
He seemed young, no doubt, to Franklin, who was
vainly endeavouring to feel old at seventy ; but Paine
was already eight and thirty, and had left behind him
in England a wrecked career and a ruined home. He
was separated from his wife ; and the Commissioners of
Inland Revenue had ejected him from the employment
by which he earned his bread. Nor can it be said that
his antecedents pointed him out as a leader of the popu-
lar party in America ; for his misfortune had arisen
from his having been too outspoken a champion of the
claims and interests of excisemen. On the other hand,
enemies of the Revenue might account it in his favour
that he had passed among his official superiors for a
notoriously lax and inefficient gauger.
Far from immaculate, Paine was not without his
excuses. The constitution of society in the country
from which he came was ill suited to humble men who
were more desirous to express their political opinions
than to improve their material fortunes. For their
views on public questions no demand existed ; and, if
they tried to create one, the Court of King's Bench, and
the Sergeant-at-Arms of the House of Commons, might
soon have had a good deal that was very unpleasant to
say to them. Cut off from more congenial opportunities
of intellectual expansion, Paine's energies had hitherto
been directed into sordid, and even vicious, channels ;
but there was in him something higher and better than
had been called forth by the circumstances in which
the prime of his life was passed. Franklin asked his
I48 THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
correspondents in America to put the newcomer into
the way of obtaining the post of a clerk, or assistant
surgeon, or usher in a school ; but Paine turned his
attention to literature. His articles were the making
of a publication which had lately been started in
Philadelphia; and he soon became the editor. He
conducted the magazine with great and ever increasing
success, which was the more remarkable and honour-
able because he never shrank from the defence of novel,
and sometimes most unpopular, principles. He con-
demned duelling, and the deliberate or thoughtless ill-
treatment of animals. He spoke up against negro slavery
quite as emphatically as against hereditary privileges
and religious intolerance. He advocated international
arbitration ; international and internal copyright ; and
justice to women, especially in the form of increased
facilities for divorce. Many causes which, for good or
otherwise, have since prevailed in America, had their
first, or very nearly their first, exposition in the pages
of the "Pennsylvania Magazine." During eighteen
months, (so a competent judge has pronounced,) there
probably never was the same amount of good literary
work done on a salary of fifty pounds a year. 1
In the second week of January, 1776, a pamphlet
called "Common Sense" appeared in Philadelphia.
The production had those merits which the title
indicated. The author, whoever he was, made no pre-
tence to guide his readers through the Dismal Swamp of
the financial controversy, — that intricate and slippery
region where even Edmund Burke had confessed
himself afraid to tread* But he was familiar with
1 The Life of Thomas Paine, by Moncure Daniel Conway ; chapter iv.
* Sir, I think you must perceive that I am resolved thia day to have
nothing at all to do with the question of the right of taxation. I do not ex-
amine whether the giving away a man's money be a power excepted and
reserved out of the general trust of government ; or whether, on the
contrary, a right of taxation is necessarily involved in the general principle of
legislation, and inseparable from the ordinary supreme power. These are
deep questions, where great names militate against each other ; where rea-
son is perplexed, and an appeal to authorities only thickens the confusion.
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COMMON SENSE"
149
public transactions, and in touch with popular opinion ;
and he gave forcible and glowing expression to the
thoughts and aspirations which surged around him in a
hundred thousand souls. The poet has been described,
by a poet, as one who expresses that which is only
thought by others ; 1 and the same is the secret of
the orator and the publicist. Learned men, a cen-
tury afterwards, construct an elaborate catalogue of
the reasons and considerations which ought to have
governed, whether they did or not, the actors in
historical events; but the true motives, that once
swayed great multitudes, have to be sought in those
speeches and writings which stirred them at the time.
The author of " Common Sense " has not unfrequcntly
been criticised as superficial ; and ill-educated and in-
experienced perhaps he was. But he saw beyond pre-
cedents and statutes, and constitutional facts or fictions,
into the depths of human nature ; and he knew that,
if men are to fight to the death, it must be for reasons
which all can understand.
America, (so the writer declared,) would flourish as
much, and probably much more, if no European power
had anything to do with her government. The articles
of commerce by which she had enriched herself were
not articles of fancy and luxury, but the prime necessa-
ries of life ; and she would always have a market in
Europe for her produce while eating was the custom of
that continent. She gained no profit from the English
connection, and she suffered in her dignity. A greater
absurdity could not be conceived than three millions of
For high and reverend authorities lift up their head* on both sides, and
there is no sure footing in the middle. This point is
« The great Serbonian bog,
Betwixt Damiata and Mount Casius old,
Where armies whole have sunk.'
I do not intend to be overwhelmed in that bog, though in such respectable
company." Burke's Speech on his Resolutions for Conciliation with Amer-
ica ; March 22, 1775.
I " You tell
What we felt only."
The ImU Ride Together, by Robert Browning.
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150 THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
people running to their sea-coast, every time a ship ar-
rived from London, to know what portion of liberty they
should enjoy. Let alone the humiliation, Americans
endured great practical inconvenience by their subjec-
tion to a nation so far distant from them, and so very
ignorant about all which concerned them. To be for
ever travelling three or four thousand miles with a tale
or a petition, and waiting four or five months for an
answer which, when obtained, wanted five or six more
to explain it, would in a few years be looked upon as
folly and childishness. There was a time during which
such a condition of things had been proper ; there was
a proper time for it to cease; and that time was the
date when the first shots were fired at Lexington. " The
period of debate is closed. Arms, in the last resource,
must decide the contest. A new era for politics is
struck. A new method of thinking has arisen. All
plans and proposals prior to that nineteenth of April
are like the almanacs of last year."
That was the way to write, if a man wanted to be
read ; and " Common Sense " was read to some purpose.
It would be difficult to name any human composition
which has had an effect at once so instant, so extended,
and so lasting. It flew through numberless editions.
It was pirated, and parodied, and imitated, and translated
into the language of every country where the new Re-
public had well-wishers, and could hope to procure
allies. Parisians were of opinion that it had a greater
run in France even than in America. 1 It was reprinted
in all the colonies with a frequency surprising at a time
when colonial printing-houses were very few. Three
months from its first appearance, a hundred and twenty
thousand copies had been sold in America alone ; and,
before the demand ceased, it was calculated that half a
million had seen the light. Demosthenes has said that
the power of oratory is as much in the ear as in the
tongue. The extraordinary success of this famous
pamphlet proved, if it needed proving, that the power
1 American Archives; August 1776.
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"COMMON SENSE"
151
of authorship is as much in the reader as in the writer.
" In the elements of its strength it was precisely fitted
to the hour, to the spot, and to the passions. It was
meant for plain men in desperate danger, and despe-
rately in earnest." 1
According to the contemporary newspapers, "Com-
mon Sense " turned thousands in New York to Inde-
pendence, who could not endure the idea before; in
Pennsylvania and the Carolinas it was read by all, and
few put it down unconvinced ; it had done wonders in
Maryland, and worked nothing short of miracles, for,
all over the province, it had made Tories into Whigs ;
while even in Massachusetts, where the margin for con-
version was small, it added a perceptible amount of
heat to the fire of patriotism. Authoritative testimony
to the amazing influence of "Common Sense" remains
on record in the private correspondence of innumerable
individuals. Mrs. John Adams, in a letter which must
have less than half pleased her husband, confessed
herself charmed with the sentiments of the piece, and
unable to imagine how an honest heart could hesitate
one moment at adopting them. General Charles Lee,
whose heart was as honest as his vanity would permit,
owned that its perusal had brought him round to a
belief in the necessity of separation ; and Washington
placed its " sound doctrine and unanswerable reasoning "
on a level of importance with the " flaming arguments "
which went up from the burning houses of Falmouth
and Norfolk. " My countrymen," he wrote, " will come
reluctantly into the idea of independence, but time and
persecution bring wonderful things to pass; and, by
1 Tyler's Literary History ; chapter xxi., section vii. Professor Tyler,
who always writes with force, but always with measure, thus introduces the
subject of the pamphlet: "In one sentiment all persons, Tories and
Whigs, seemed perfectly to agree : namely, in abhorrence of the project of
separation from the empire. Suddenly, however, and within a period of
less than six months, the majority of the Whigs turned completely round,
and openly declared for Independence. Anvmg the facts necessary to
enable us to account for this almost unrivalled political somersault, is that
of the appearance of 4 Common Sense.' "
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THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
letters which I have lately received from Virginia, I find
1 Common Sense ' is working a powerful change there
in the minds of many men."
The authorship was attributed to some of the most
distinguished names in America. It was reported that
the Prince of Wales was caught by his mother reading
" Dr. Franklin's pamphlet 1 Common Sense in a cor-
ner of the Palace, and stoutly refused to confess how
it had come into his possession. 1 The credit of the
book was frequently given to Samuel Adams, who had
been a literary gladiator, and no lover of monarchy,
from his youth onwards. While still at college, in
presence of all the Harvard dignitaries, he had de-
fended the thesis that it was lawful to resist the Su-
preme Magistrate, if the Commonwealth could not be
otherwise preserved. His talents were acknowledged
by friend and foe. With his own party he passed for
" the most correct, genteel, and artful pen in America; "
and Governor Bernard had declared, with a round oath,
that every dip of that pen stung like a horned snake.
Bostonians, whose business or pleasure kept them late
out of bed, seldom failed, however far the night was
spent, to see a light in a certain window which indicated
" that Sam Adams was hard at work writing against the
Tories." The most aggressive of controversialists, he
laid it down as a canon so to conduct a dispute as always
to keep your adversary in the wrong : and thousands of
people, who were acquainted with his polemical methods
and his political creed, would have it that the Junius of
America was Samuel Adams, and no other.
In the House of Commons, and in some other
1 The belief that Franklin had been the author of Common Sense was
still held in 1824 by Paul Louis Courier. "Happy was Franklin, who
saw his country free, having done more than anyone else for her freedom
by his famous Common Sense, that tract of two sheets of print. Never did
any portly volume effect so much for the human race. Rallying all hearts
and minds to the party of Independence, it decided the issue of that
great conflict which, ended for America, is still proceeding all over the
rest of the world." So wrote Courier in his Pamphlet of Pamphlets, —
the latest in date of those exquisite productions which were the first-fruits
of the great harvest of French nineteenth century literature.
"COMMON SENSE"
153
quarters, the book was ascribed to John Adams. 1 More
than three years afterwards, when he landed on Gallic
soil, he was hailed as the famous Adams, the celebrated
member of Congress, whose wonderful pamphlet
France, and all Europe, had received with rapture.
The first half of the compliment lost something in value
when he became aware that fashionable Paris, which
never mistook Benjamin Franklin for anybody else, was
not very clear in its mind as to whether the famous
Adams was John or Samuel. And to be credited with
the paternity of " Common Sense " was still less accept-
able, inasmuch as he disagreed with two-thirds of the
volume, and could not abide the real author.
That personage had been in no haste to disclose
himself. In some editions the book was announced on
the title-page as having been composed by an English-
man. In others it was described as the work of a man
unconnected with any party, and under no sort of
influence, public or private, except that of reason and
principle; but, by the summer of 1776, it was generally
known that Paine was the writer. He was accused by
John Adams, (as if it mattered,) of having been fur-
nished by others with his more telling arguments, and
especially with his title, which was the best portion of
the book. One of the recommendations contained in
" Common Sense " Adams held to be so impolitic that
he published a brief, and rather timid, protest, 2 the
appearance of which procured him a visit from Paine.
Considering that Adams regarded Paine as "a disas-
trous meteor," and his literary style as suitable for an
1 On the twenty-fourth of April, 1776, Rigby argued that the Americans
aimed at Independence. " He deduce.! this opinion from Mr. Adams's
pamphlet called Common Stmt, in which he without scruple talked of
everything short of Independency as ridiculous, and wrote in such a style
that no man here could lay claim to common sense, and not see the drift
of the writer."
■ " Thoughts on Government, Applicable to the Present State of the
American Colonies; In a letter from a Gentleman to a Friend; Phila-
delphia, 1776." It was a reply to I'aine's advocacy of a single legislative
Chamber.
154
THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
emigrant from Newgate, 1 the interview was sufficiently
amicable. Before it ended, Paine confided to Adams
that he had some thoughts of publishing his views on
religion, but believed that he had best postpone it to
the latter part of life ; — which, if he desired to retain
the confidence of New England Puritans, must in his
case be called a judicious resolution. The hold which
he had acquired over American opinion remained un-
impaired for many years to come. His reputation
gained, rather than lost, by the attempts of Tory
writers to refute him. A whole first edition of the
most able among the answers to his pamphlet has
perished, and is said to have been burned by the Sons
of Liberty. The incendiaries, however, showed their
discrimination ; for they spared another reply to " Com-
mon Sense" entitled "Plain Truth, by Candidus,"
which is so forlorn a production that in our own day
more than one admirer of the American loyalists has
been at pains to prove that his own special hero had no
hand in the writing of it.
Paine got nothing from his book except celebrity,
and a consciousness that he had powerfully promoted
the spread of opinions which he sincerely held. It was
said in South Carolina that the author of " Common
Sense" deserved a statue of gold; but none of that
metal reached him as the reward of a performance
which still is the high-water mark of success in ephem-
eral literature. He was denounced in the " Pennsyl-
vania Gazette," in a communication signed by Cato, as
an interested writer, and a stranger meddling with
American affairs. Cato was pretty well known to be
the Reverend Doctor William Smith, President of the
1 Autobiography of John Adams. Adams disliked Paine from the
moment that he first met him; but the contemptuous expressions quoted
in the text are of much later date. The Autobiography was written after
Paine had published The Age of Reason, and 7 he Rights of Man ; and
when he was a notorious partisan, and Adams a prominent adversary, of
the French Revolution. In 1776 an American patriot would hardly ha\e
ventured, even in the privacy of a journal, to handle the author of Com-
mon Sense so disrespectfully.
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THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE 1 55
University of Philadelphia ; a man altogether devoid of
sympathy with those who do public work gratis. To
that untiring and ubiquitous solicitor for Church prefer-
ment Paine replied that Cato was a stranger nowhere,
and a slave everywhere. So much revenge he allowed
himself to take ; but he did not condescend to repel the
unworthy imputation, which had been levelled against
his motives, by vaunting, or even mentioning, his own
disinterestedness. He sold his book at a price that
constituted a renunciation of all personal profit; and
he subsequently followed the same course with regard
to other publications which had only less vogue than
his first pamphlet. He surrendered a fortune in the
case of that pamphlet alone ; and "notwithstanding this
experience Paine also gave to the States the copyright
of his * Crisis ' ; was taunted as a gazetteer ; ate his
crust contentedly ; and the peace found him a penniless
patriot, who might easily have had fifty thousand
pounds in his pocket" 1
John Adams, — a good workman, but one who quar-
relled with his tools, — decried the merits of " Common
Sense " ; and yet that book rendered the main exploit of
his own life possible, and in the later stages almost easy.
The direction in which ideas had been set marching
showed itself first, according to the custom of the
colonies, in the tone of the sermons. So late as Feb-
ruary 1776, President William Smith, who had been in-
vited by Congress to deliver a funeral eulogy in honour
of General Montgomery, had taken that curious oppor-
tunity of announcing that the sentiments of the body
which he addressed were opposed to Independence ;
and a considerable number of the members, (though not
a majority,) were in favour of thanking the orator, and
requesting him to print the oration. But already in the
1 Conway's Paine ; chapter vi. The publisher of Common Sense
sent in a bill to the author of nearly thirty pounds for presentation copies.
That amount appears to have represented the final balance on the whole
transaction.
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1 56 THE AMERICAN RE VOL UTION
ensuing May, when John Adams went to hear a dis-
course on the signs of the times, the preacher treated
him to a comparison between George the Third and
Pharaoh, and an assurance that Providence, which had
liberated the Jews, would do as much for the Ameri-
cans. The part which man had to play in that enter-
prise was all the more likely to be successful because
the chief of the actors regarded himself as a chosen in-
strument " Is it not," Adams wrote to his wife, " a say-
ing of Moses, 1 Who am I, that I should go in and out
before this great people 1 ? When I consider the great
events which have passed, and those greater which are
rapidly advancing, I feel an awe upon my mind which
is not easily described." For some weeks more, such
thoughts as these fermented in the heads of the patri-
ots; and on the seventh of June Richard Henry Lee,
in the name and with the authority of Virginia, called
upon Congress to resolve in favour of declaring the
thirteen colonies independent. After several days of de-
bate it was arranged that an interval should be allowed
for the purpose of enabling the delegates of the central
provinces to consult their constituents ; but that, to pre-
vent loss of time, a small committee should be charged
with the duty of preparing a Declaration in harmony with
the proposed resolution. And then Congress dropped the
subject for a while, and reverted to the endless routine
of administration, which was always going forward be-
hind the scenes of that great drama ; — providing mus-
kets for one battalion, and stopping the price of uniforms
out of the pay of another ; fixing the salary of the Sec-
retary of the Board of War and Ordnance at a hundred
and sixty pounds a year ; voting John Bruce the sum of
thirteen dollars as the balance of his bill for cartridge-
boxes, and twelve dollars to Margaret Thomas for nurs-
ing two soldiers in the small-poxJ
The Committee was composed of Roger Sherman and
Robert Livingston, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams,
and Thomas Jefferson. Congress chose them by ballot ;
1 Journals of Congress for June 1 776.
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THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE I 57
and most votes were cast for Jefferson. He was
a young man, and an unobtrusive legislator ; but an
independent fortune had given him leisure for self-
culture, and he had not wasted his privilege. Congress
was a practical assembly, and selected men for posts
which they were qualified to hold. They appointed
Washington Commander-in-Chief because he could
fight ; they sent Franklin to Paris because he had culti-
vated the art of turning great people round his finger;
and they entrusted the Declaration of Independence
to Jefferson because, both in style and substance, his
writings betokened the lawyer, the statesman, and the
student. 1 The spirit which he brought to the task is
displayed in a private letter, dated six months before
he received a commission to be the exponent of his
country's wrongs. "There is not," he said, "in the
British empire a man who more cordially loves a union
with Great Britain than I do. But, by the God that
made me, I will cease to exist before I yield to a con-
nection on such terms as the British Parliament pro-
pose; and in this I think I speak the sentiments of
America." 2 That was no vain boast, as a century
and a quarter of Fourths of July have already shown.
Jefferson wrote off the Declaration, without looking
inside a book or a pamphlet. So representative an
American as Franklin found nothing to add or to ex-
punge; and the other members of the committee were
not less speedily and entirely satisfied. Two or three
verbal corrections were suggested ; and then Jefferson
made a fair copy in his own hand, which was laid before
Congress on the twenty-eighth of June.
1 " The Sub-Committee met. Jefferson proposed to me to make the
draught. I said, 'I will not.' 'You should do it.' 'Oh no.' 'Why
not ? ' ' Reasons enough.' * What can be your reasons ? ' ' Reason
first,— You are a Virginian ; and a Virginian ought to appear at the head
of this business. Reason second, — I am obnoxious and unpopular ; you
are very much otherwise. Reason third, — You can write ten times better
than I can.' " John Adams to Colonel Timothy Pickering; August 6, 1822.
* Thomas Jefferson to John Randolph ; Philadelphia, November 29,
»775-
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I58 THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
The discussion of the Virginian resolution was re-
sumed on the first of July. The names of the speakers
are known, and the sides which they took, and, (in a
few cases,) the impression which they produced upon
their audience. There our information stops. In those
days, (said John Adams,) there were no stenographers ;
speeches were never printed ; and all that was not
handed down orally, like the harangues of Indian ora-
tors, was lost in air. 1 The Chevalier Botta, an historian
of the American war, constructed imaginary declama-
tions in choice Italian, and put them into the mouths of
the statesmen at Philadelphia. A lifelike picture of
Congress, however, must not be sought in the pages
of a Piedmontese who, when recording debates in the
Parliament at Westminster, made English public men
address each other as Honourable Senators and Dear
Fellow-citizens, instead of the Worthy Alderman and
the Noble Lord in the Red Ribbon. Nor was the text
of speeches made by the Revolutionary leaders to be
found among the papers which they left behind them ;
for their colleagues in the State House of Philadelphia,
during the summer of 1776, were in no mood to listen to
the eloquence of manuscript. Dr. Witherspoon of New
Jersey, who had preached in a Scotch pulpit, was said
never to have addressed Congress without committing
his observations to memory ; but the most telling sen-
tence which he uttered on this historical occasion could
not have taken very long to compose. In his judge-
ment, (he said,) the country was not only ripe for Inde-
pendence, but was in danger of becoming rotten for
want of it. That went to the root of the matter. It
was in vain that the friends of the British connection
exerted themselves to the utmost against a foregone
conclusion. Dickinson fired a parting salvo in defence
1 John Adams to Henry Niles ; Quincy, January 14, 1818. In a letter
to Thomas McKean, in 1815, Adams says: "The debates and delibera-
tions of Congress, from 1774 to 1783, were all in secret, and are now lost
for ever. Mr. Dickinson printed a speech, which he said he made in
Congress against the Declaration of Independence ; but it appeared to
me very different from that which you and I heard."
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THE DECLARATION OF INDEPE.
159
of his own position, which had always been illogical,
and had now become untenable ; but that position was
stormed and carried by the irresistible onset of John
Adams. Not a word of his speech had been considered
beforehand ; not a word has reached posterity ; but
every person there present pronounced it to be above
criticism, and beyond praise. According to Jefferson,
his deep conceptions and nervous style, (and, it may
safely be added, the faith that was in him,) gave him
a power of thought and phrase which moved his hearers
out of themselves. A Congressman from the central
colonies, not specially given to classical allusions, ex-
claimed that Adams had stood forth as the Atlas of
Independence ; and the Virginian delegates paid him
the unique tribute of admitting that nothing better had
ever been heard at Williamsburg. The expression of
views and convictions, which had so long been rolling
up and down in his mind, seemed to Adams himself a
small matter. In a private letter, written that evening,
he described the debate as time misspent*; because
nothing was said but what had been repeated, and
hackneyed, in that room a hundred times over for six
months past. 1
The Resolution was carried, with the adherence of
only nine among the thirteen colonies; and it was
understood that a final and decisive vote would be taken
on the morrow. But the season for debate came sud-
denly to a close. That very afternoon, while Dickin-
son was still speaking, a hundred and thirty-seven sail
were counted in the channel north of Sandy Hook,
within three leagues of New York ; and heavy firing
of cannon was heard at four o'clock on the next morn-
ing. 2 Before the sitting of the first July came to an
end, a despatch from General Washington had been
read aloud at the table, reporting that the English ships
were dropping in by threes and fours ; that an attack
was imminent ; and that, with the slender forces at his
1 John Adams to Samuel Chase; Philadelphia, July 1, 1776.
■ John Cortenhoven to the President of Congress. American Archives.
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160 THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
command, it would require all his exertions to prevent
the ruin and destruction which appeared to be impend-
ing. It was the sort of argument which turns votes
wholesale wherever Anglo-Saxons are concerned. South
Carolina came round at once; — for the sake of una-
nimity, as the delegates alleged ; but in reality because
the fighting blood in their veins neutralised the effect
of all the Quaker claret which they had imbibed since
Congress met in the fall of the preceding year. Dela-
ware acceded to the Resolution ; and enough Pennsyl-
vanians stayed away to enable the suffrage of their
colony to be cast on the same side. New York was
still in the throes of constitution-making, and her repre-
sentatives, who had not yet received an authoritative
mandate, sate apart while the vote was being taken ;
but it had been ascertained that all of them, except one,
were personally in favour of Independence. Congress
affirmed, — and none of the thirteen provinces dissented,
— that the united colonies were, and of right ought to
be, free and independent States; that they were ab-
solved from all allegiance to the British Crown ; and
that the political connection between them and Great
Britain was dissolved. " Thus," said Adams, M was de-
cided the greatest question which ever was debated in
America ; and a greater, perhaps, never was, nor will
be, decided among men. The Second day of July, 1776,
will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the
great anniversary festival. It ought to be commemo-
rated as the day of deliverance by acts of devotion to
God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with pomp
and parade, with guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations
from one end of this continent to the other, from this
time forward for evermore." 1
It was a veracious prophecy, although the date
named was wrong by eight and forty hours; for the
Declaration of Independence had not yet been sub-
mitted to Congress for revisal, correction, and approval.
So much still remained to do ; and that the pressure of
1 John Adams to Mrs. Adams ; Philadelphia, July 3, 1776.
■
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THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE l6l
necessity required it to be done quickly was well both
for the merits of the composition, and the feelings of
the author. Even as it was, Jefferson suffered, as man
must ever suffer, from the excision of some among his
most glowing periods. Franklin, who sate next him,
and perceived that he "was not insensible to these
mutilations," comforted him by a homely apologue, in
queer disproportion to the magnitude of the occasion. 1
But Congress used a sparing hand ; and the alterations
made were all in the direction of the accuracy, the con-
ciseness, and the discretion on which the literary excel-
lence of a State-paper depends. In the original draft
George the Third had been taken to task for withdraw-
ing his governors, and thereby depriving the colonists
of his favour and protection. The list of charges
against that monarch was sufficiently voluminous with-
out the insertion of any such preposterous imputation ;
for the royal governors had withdrawn themselves to the
shelter of the nearest British frigate, without orders from
Whitehall, and not a moment before it was necessary.
Indeed, the only one of them still resident at the capital
of his province was the governor of New Jersey, whose
late subjects had got him safe under lock and key.
Jefferson, again, had written, and somewhat over-
written, a denunciation of the King for having refused
his sanction to the successive endeavours which the
Virginian assembly had made, in all honesty, to sup-
press the importation of negroes. The accusation in
itself was just ; since George the Third had exerted his
Veto in defence of the slave-trade with unusual zest,
and with strong resentment against the authors of the
proposal which he thought fit to negative. But Jeffer-
son's treatment of this burning question was, (to use his
1 " I have made it a rule," (Franklin told his younger colleague,) " to
avoid becoming the draftsman of papers to be reviewed by a public body.
I took my lesson from an incident which I will relate to you." And then
he told, with a perfection of native humour, his tale of the hatter who
composed an inscription for his shop-front, and invited his friends and
neighbours to criticise the wording of it. The story is given in full by
Jared Sparks, in the ninth chapter of his Lift of Franklin.
FT. II.— VOL. I. M
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1 62 THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
own imposing words,) " disapproved by some Southern
gentlemen, whose reflections were not yet matured to
the full abhorrence of that traffic." And some Northern
gentlemen rightly apprehended that the world outside
the United States, and very probably their own descend-
ants likewise, would fail to distinguish between the
guilt of keeping, and the guilt of importing, slaves.
Their American sense of humour was already sufficiently
developed for them to perceive that allusious to negroes
should be sparingly introduced into a document which
proclaimed it a self-evident truth that men were created
equal, and endowed by their Creator with an inalienable
right to liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
The most important change was the conversion of
the paragraph, addressed to the people of Great Britain,
from a bitter impeachment to a friendly and pathetic
remonstrance. That change was highly politic in view
of passing events ; and it saved future generations from
a situation which would sometimes have been ludicrous,
and at others most embarrassing. George the Third has
long passed away ; although America annually denies
him the benefit of the kindly Latin proverb which bids us
be silent about the dead, where we cannot praise them.
But the British people is as much alive as ever; and
it is a good thing that every township between the
Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans does not listen once a
summer to Jefferson's thrilling sentences about the last
stab that had been given to agonizing affection, and
the duty of forgetting the love which the colonists
formerly entertained towards their unfeeling brethren
in England.
Under the amending touch of Congress the Declara-
tion of Independence assumed, and kept, the shape of
an indictment against the King. The framers of that
indictment did not act in ignorance. Eager readers of
history, with an especial fondness for its dry and legal
aspects, they had all been nurtured on 'the doctrine that
the King could do no wrong, and that, when an account
had to be exacted, his ministers were answerable. But
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THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE 163
they were not inditing a treatise on the theory of the
British Constitution. They were contending for their
lives and fortunes against a practical abuse of that
Constitution which those English writers, who more
than others are careful to weigh their words, have de-
nounced with the most telling vehemence. Mr. Lecky,
stating the case shortly but comprehensively, relates
how George the Third habitually declined to call into
his counsels any statesman resolute and conscientious
enough to insist that the policy of the country should
be directed by its responsible ministers, instead of being
dictated by an irresponsible sovereign. At a notable
crisis, which occurred later on in this very war, the
King refused to dismiss North, Wedderburn, and Sand-
wich, and to place the administration in the hands of
Chatham and Rockingham. That refusal is declared
by Mr. Lecky, — a judge who charges with rare im-
partiality, and as a rule gives light sentences, — to be as
criminal as any of the acts which led Charles the First
to the scaffold. The author of that " Short History of
the English People" which, to their advantage, the
English people have found time to read, devotes an
uncomplimentary page to the Government that held
office continuously for fourteen years after the retire-
ment of Chatham in 1768. Mr. Green there says that
the influence of the King was predominant in the Cabi-
net from the first, and was supreme in the later and
more disastrous days when North had gone to the
Treasury. "George was in fact sole Minister during
the eight years that followed ; and the shame of the
darkest hour of English history lies wholly at his door."
The King was his own prime minister, and as auto-
cratic a prime minister as Whitehall had ever seen.
To prove and illustrate that position is an act of super-
fluity. It would be pedantry to multiply authorities.
There are none on the other side. If learned men,
writing securely in their libraries a century after date,
could not restrain the expression of their righteous
indignation, is it a matter for wonder that the Ameri-
M 2
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THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
can colonists, between two great campaigns, with the
King's sword at their throats, and his German merce-
naries and Indian allies almost at the threshold of their
homes, should have spurned the conventionalities of the
law-books, and arraigned the monarch instead of casting
blame upon the nation ? Save and except for the
system of personal government, which George the Third
had laboriously built up ever since 1760, Americans and
Englishmen would not have been slaughtering each
other in 1776. The King's policy caused the war; the
King kept it going, long after everybody except him-
self was weary of it ; and in 1 782 that war was termi-
nated, against his will, by nothing except a peremptory
injunction from the English people, who, if they had
been properly represented in Parliament, would have
brought it to an end long before.
The stock charge against the Declaration of Inde-
pendence, — repeated in a hundred shapes ever since it
appeared in print, — has been that it lacked originality,
and that its author was a plagiarist. It was imitated,
(so we are informed,) from the State-papers of the Long
Parliament; it owed much to Locke, and much to
Milton, and more still to Rousseau ; and some of the
ideas were taken without acknowledgement from one of
Mrs. Aphra Behn's indecorous comedies. 1 More recent
sources, on which Jefferson had largely drawn, were
detected in a Charge delivered to the Grand Jury of
Charleston ; in the Virginian Declaration of Rights ;
and in a mythical document, said to have been issued
as early as May 1775 by the citizens of Mecklenburg
County in North Carolina. John Adams, great at great
moments, but with a mind too active and uneasy for the
prolonged leisure of his later days, six and forty years
1 The Widow Ranter, or The History of Bacon in Virginia, which
Dryden honoured with a prologue, contains a very full-flavoured descrip-
tion of the horrors of Indian warfare. As if a Virginian of 1 776, who had
lived through a real Cherokee war, could not find words to protest against
the treatment which his country-people were likely to endure from hired
savages without having to look in a foolish play written in London more
than a century before !
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THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE 165
afterwards explained to a correspondent that there was
nothing new in Jefferson's paper.* Jefferson lived to see
the letter of his old colleague, and his remarks on it were
as sensible as they were good-tempered and dignified.
M I did not," he said, 11 consider it as any part of my
charge to invent new ideas, and to offer no sentiment
which had ever been expressed before. Had Mr. Adams
been so restrained, Congress would have lost the benefit
of his bold and impressive advocations of the rights of
Revolution. For no man's fervid addresses, more than
his, encouraged and supported us through the difficulties
which, like the ceaseless action of gravity, weighed on
us by night and by day. Yet, on the same ground, we
may ask which of his elevated thoughts was new, or
can be affirmed never before to have entered the con-
ceptions of man ? "
An American author has argued powerfully and truly
that, for such a paper as Jefferson was commissioned
to write, the one quality which it could not properly
have possessed would have been originality. Was he
to regard himself as a literary essayist, set to produce
a sort of prize dissertation on history and politics with
a particular application to Anglo-American affairs?
Was he not rather the mouth-piece of a people who
had deliberately exposed themselves to perils, the
gravity of which they all had measured, under the
influence of motives by which they one and all were
swayed ? 2 The wiser world has recognised that there
1 " As you justly observe, there is not an idea in it but what had been
hackneyed in Congress for two years before. The substance is contained
in the Declaration of Rights and the violation of those Rights, in the
Journals of Congress in 1774. Indeed, the essence of it is in a pamphlet,
voted and printed by the town of Boston before the first Congress met,
composed by James Otis, as I suppose, in one of his lucid intervals, and
penned and polished by Samuel Adams." John Adams to Timothy
Pickering ; August 6, 1822. Jefferson's observations on this letter were
addressed to James Madison in August 1823.
2 Tyler's Literary History ; chapter xxxiii., section 6. Professor
Tyler disposes of the allegation of plagiarising from the early champions
of English liberty in a passage which Fox and Macaulay would have liked
well to read. " In the development of political life in England and
America there had already been created a vast literature of constitutional
1 66 THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
are certain productions which stand in a class apart.
To that class belong Elizabeth's speech at Tilbury, and
the Declaration of William of Orange, and President
Lincoln's discourse in the Cemetery at Gettysburg.
The excellence of such pieces is to be judged, not by
the ordinary rules of criticism, but by the character and
extent of the response they evoked from the nation to
which they were addressed. An English member of
Parliament, in the following autumn session, said that
Jefferson's style was full of faults, and possessed no
merit except that of captivating the people. He was
told in answer by John Wilkes that he had paid the
American a high compliment; for the people would
have to decide the controversy, and, if they were cap-
tivated, the end had been attained. 1 The people, (said
Samuel Adams,) seemed to recognise the Resolution of
Congress as if it were a decree promulgated from heaven.
The Declaration of Independence went straight to their
hearts, because they found in it their own conceptions,
put into words which few or none of them were capable
of writing. Jefferson had " poured the soul of the Con-
tinent" into his manifesto; and therefore, (as a Con-
gressman, who had signed it, joyfully exclaimed,) "it
produced a glorious effect and made the colonies all
alive."
To be read aloud is the severest test of a literary
composition; and the least favourable critic of the
Declaration of Independence will not assert that it
has been insufficiently subjected to that ordeal. The
public listened to it for the first time on the eighth
of July, 1776, when it was delivered, slowly and very
impressively, in the State-house yard, from a platform
which in peaceful times had been erected for the purpose
progress, — a literature common to both portions of the English race, —
>crvaded by its own stately traditions, and reverberating certain great
>hrases which formed, as one may say, almost the vernacular of English
ustice, and of English aspiration for a free, manly, and orderly political
ife. In this vernacular the Declaration of Independence was written."
1 Parliamentary History. Debate on the Address of October 31,
1776.
1
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THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE 1 67
of observing the planet Venus. 1 The Pennsylvanian
militia paraded on the Common, and fired away an
amount of powder most discomposing to members of the
Secret Committee charged with importing ammunition,
and collecting sulphur and saltpetre. The welkin, (we
are told in good old English,) was rent with cheers.
The bells were rung, all day and all night, by relays of
the best chimers in the city. To these joyous accom-
paniments an election of members for Philadelphia, in
the new State Assembly, went briskly forward; and
Benjamin Franklin was returned at the head of a list of
sturdy patriots, containing a note-worthy infusion of
German names. The royal coat of arms was taken
down from the Court House, and burned amidst the
acclamations of a throng of spectators. Scenes of this
nature were successively renewed in every colony, or
rather, (for that word was now out of use,) in every
State, 2 as the slow posts came travelling in with the
intelligence of what had passed in Philadelphia.
Throughout Massachusetts the Declaration was read
in all the churches, and entered at full length in the
records of the towns. In the sea-ports of Rhode Island
the news was greeted by loud huzzas for " Free Trade
with all the world," from crowds of hardy mariners who
for some years back had taken very good care that
Rhode Island, in any case, should enjoy the blessings of
1 " One unseen auditor there was who has left us an account of that
day. Deborah Norris, then a girl of fifteen, had climbed her garden wall
to catch a glimpse of what was going on. The reader was hidden from
her by the side of the Observatory; but she heard distinctly from her high
perch every word he uttered, and was awed into a childish terror as the
grave voice repeated slowly those memorable words, the full significance
of which she was too youug to understand." Philadelphia ; Tht Place
and People; chapter xii.
a In November 1775 Congress considered the Instructions to New
Hampshire. " By this time," wrote John Adams, " I mortally hated the
words Provinces, Colonies, and Mother-Country, and strove to get them
out of the Report. The last was indeed left out ; but the other two were
retained even by this Committee, who were as high Americans as any in
the Home." The two first terms have long been obsolete in America ;
but there are pleasant symptoms of the third expression once more coming
into fashion.
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1 68
THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
free trade between ten at night, and three in the morning.
There were bonfires in one city, and illuminations,
with rockets and crackers, in another; every locality
contributing some additional suggestion towards the
programme of jubilation, which everywhere, and ever
since, has been observed with all the sanctity of a ritual.
The Assembly of South Carolina, which was among the
latest converts to Independence, accepted the procla-
mation of it "with unspeakable pleasure." The ragged
fever-stricken garrisons, who were guarding the northern
passes along the Hudson river and the line of lakes,
assembled to shout over the tidings that they now had
a country to sicken and to die for. At New York the
Declaration was read at the head of the brigades in what
was still a well-nourished and self-confident army. The
same evening a mob of soldiers, their blood curdled by
the recitation of that portentous catalogue of George
the Third's iniquities, pulled down his equestrian effigy
on Bowling Green. Horse and man were soon in the
melting pots, and re-appeared as bullets of the same
material, (so a city humourist declared,) as the brains
of those rulers who to gain a pepper-corn had lost an
empire. 1 Washington rebuked the riot in a General
Order; but, as a work of art, the statue was beyond
recovery. The lead had already been distributed
among a thousand cartouch-boxes ; and portions of it
must to this day be embedded in the heart of forest
trees which shade the old battle-fields of Long Island
and the Jerseys.
And so the United States of America were started on
their career duly equipped with a journtc ; — a national
possession of the sort which France has inherited in too
great abundance, and England only in the somewhat
questionable shape of the Fifth November. 2 There have
1 The statue yielded 42,500 bullet*, life of Major General John
Pa/erson, by his great-grandson Thomas Egleston, LL.D.
■ It is characteristic of the indifference of our forefathers to historical
anniversaries that the most important reason for keeping the Fifth of
November, — the landing of William uf Orange, — was soon as good as
forgotten. We ran a near chance of a journee on the Tenth of April,
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THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE 1 69
been very famous Fourths of July. One of them, which
promised to be gloomy, was brightened by the victory
of Gettysburg and the capture of Vicksburg. Another
was signalised by the destruction of the Spanish fleet
outside the harbour at Santiago. But there is one anni-
versary of the Declaration of Independence the interest
of which can never be surpassed. John Adams lived
to a great age. He heard, or read, forty-five orations
on the anniversary of the Boston Massacre, and he
might have been present at many more ; but, when
turned of eighty, he ceased to take pleasure in " young
gentlemen of genius describing scenes they never saw,
and descanting on feelings they never felt, and which
great pains had been taken that they should never
feel." 1 His wife died old, but long before him ; and
he waited very quietly, and not unhappily, till the time
came to rejoin her. 2 A cheerful account of his closing
years has been left by his grandson, — the taciturn,
much-enduring, diplomatist whose presence in London
from 1 86 1 to 1865 did no little to avert a desolating
war between England and America. We are told how
the ex-President lived on till his sight almost failed, tak-
ing his daily ride ; and sitting at home, with his arms
folded over the head of his cane, straight upright in an
old colonial arm-chair, and in the old colonial attitude.
He never tired of listening to the latest and most ad-
mired works of contemporary literature, — the Waverley
novels, the sea-stories of Fenimore Cooper, and the
1848 ; but the good fortune of England prevailed ; and we have secured
the most valuable among those constitutional reforms, to obtain which the
Chartists rose, without being under an obligation to observe the day.
1 John Adams to Dr. Morse ; Quincy, January 5, 1 816.
a The Ambassador speaks thus of the letters which, in 1763 and sub-
sequent years, passed between his grandfather and grandmother. ** With
what a mixture of feelings do I look over these old papers ! They con-
tain the secret history of the lives of a single couple ; joy and sunshine,
grief and clouds, sorrow and storms. The vicissitudes are rapid, the inci-
dents are interesting. Happy are those who pass through this valley with
so much innocence ! " The quotation is from a Lift of Charles Francis
Adams, published in 1900 by his son, C. F. Adams, — a veritable master-
piece among shurt biographies.
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lyo THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
poetry of Byron. In February 1825 he received a letter
from his old friend, the Marquis of Lafayette, wishing
him joy on the election of his son, John Quincy Adams,
as sixth President of the United States. He was still
susceptible to the emotions which such events excite in
a father's breast. " Never," he wrote, " did I feel so
much solemnity as upon this occasion. The multitude
of my thoughts, and the intensity of my feelings, are
too much for a mind like mine, in its ninetieth year."
One other founder of the Republic still breathed
American air. Twenty-five years had elapsed since
John Adams was President, and seventeen since Thomas
Jefferson left the Executive Mansion at Washington
after a second term of office. The Fourth of July,
Eighteen Hundred and Twenty-six, was the Jubilee of
Independence ; and the eyes of all spontaneously turned
to the two veterans, — so long divided by political differ-
ences, more recent indeed than the Revolution, but
already of ancient date. It was hoped that they might
meet once again, to shake hands over their life's work in
the presence of an immense assemblage ; some of whom
might speak of it in the twentieth century as the most
memorable sight an American ever witnessed. But
they both were very feeble, and the hope was aban-
doned. A few days before the festival, Adams was
invited to suggest a toast which his neighbours might
honour at their banquet with the knowledge that it
came from him. "I will give you," said he, "'Inde-
pendence for ever ! 1 " He was asked if he would add
anything to it; and he replied, "Not a word." The
great day arrived, and the old statesmen, for all that
they were absent, were not forgotten. " From one end
of the country to the other, wherever Americans were
gathered together, the names of Adams and Jefferson
were coupled in accents of gratitude and praise. Party
passions were completely drowned in the flood of na-
tional feeling which overspread the land." 1 All day
long Adams was sinking rapidly, and without pain.
1 Life of John Adams ; chapter xi.
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THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE 171
His last audible remark is said to have been : " Thomas
Jefferson still survives." But such was not the case.
Jefferson died at noon on that Fourth of July, and
Adams shortly before sunset. There are few more
striking circumstances, and no more remarkable coinci-
dences, in history.
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CHAPTER VI
WASHINGTON IN BOSTON. WASHINGTON'S NEW YORK
ARMY. THE AMERICAN SOLDIER
Although America had now defined her attitude in
the face of England and of Europe, she required some-
thing beside State-papers, however resolutely worded, in
order to stem the tide of war which was surging in upon
her confines. She possessed a victorious army and a
popular general ; but they had still to prove what they
were respectively worth under an ordeal far more ar-
duous than that by which they had hitherto been tested.
On the twentieth of March, 1776, Washington made his
entry into Boston ; and the people, whom he had res-
cued, gave him the very choicest entertainment which
their town afforded. He attended the Thursday Lec-
ture, the social event of a New England week ; and he
there listened to a prophecy, truer than most, that the
city was thenceforward a tabernacle that should never
be taken down, of which not one of the stakes should
ever be removed, nor one of the cords be broken. He
was gratefully welcomed by the Selectmen of Boston,
and by the two branches of the Massachusetts Legis-
lature. Charles Lee, then commanding in Virginia,
wrote him a letter of congratulation. That letter con-
tained four sentences about the grievances of General
Lee for every one which related to the glories of Gen-
eral Washington ; but it freely testified to the esteem
felt by friends and neighbours for the great soldier
whom Virginians loved to call their " countryman " in
the limited sense in which provincial patriots then em-
ployed the term. 1 The Congress at Philadelphia, on
1 "Go on, my dear General ; crown yourself with glory, and establish
the liberties and lustre of your country on a foundation more permanent
172
WASHINGTON IN BOSTON
173
the motion of John Adams, voted thanks to their army
and its leader ; and Washington acknowledged the com-
pliment on behalf of his troops. They were, (he said,)
at the first a band of undisciplined husbandmen ; but it
was, under God, to their bravery, and attention to their
duty, that success had been due. Congress, moreover,
struck a gold medal inscribed with some brave Latin
mottoes. It bore on one face a fleet, sailing out of a
harbour beneath the cannon of a besieging force ; and
on the other a head of Washington, whose features lent
themselves readily to artistic treatment. They did well
to take some pains over the design ; for that medal was
the only coin which their general consented to receive
from them in payment of his services.
The confidence which Washington inspired among
his fellow-citizens contributed more than any other cir-
cumstance to carry America safe and triumphant
through all her difficulties; but, for the present, the
somewhat premature splendour of his reputation was
not without its dangers. Congressmen could not bring
themselves to believe that any tasks whatsoever were
above his capacity ; and, at the same time, they had not
learned to resist the temptation of indicating to him,
peremptorily and persistently, what those tasks should
be. Even when the Committees at Philadelphia re-
frained from direct interference, the unbounded admira-
tion with which the general was regarded proved a
source of embarrassment to himself, and of peril to his
cause. Public opinion relied upon the liberator of
Boston to surrender no American town, and yield no
than the Capitol Rock. My situation is just as I expected. I am afraid
I shall make a shabby figure, without any real demerits of my own. I
am like a dog in a dancing-school. I know not where to turn myself,
where to fix myself. The circumstances of the country intersected by
navigable rivers, the uncertainty of the enemy's designs, who can fly in an
instant to any spot they choose with their canvas wings, throw me, and
would throw Julius Csesar, into this inevitable dilemma. I may possibly
be in the North when, as Richard says, I should serve my sovereign
in the West." It was a private letter ; but, unfortunately for Washing-
ton, I^e had only one style for his private letter* and hit official de-
spatches.
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174 THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
square mile of American territory ; and during the com-
ing months the pressure of that opinion exercised a bane-
ful, and very nearly a fatal, influence over Washington's
strategy. It was a weakness of which he was cured be-
fore the year ended ; and his countrymen, too, received
a lesson which they never forgot. From that time for-
ward they allowed him his own way, — all the more be-
cause it became evident that his own way was the one
which he meant to take. During the remainder of the
war the men, money, and provisions supplied to Wash-
ington by Congress often, indeed, fell far short of his
requirements; but in the military disposal of the re-
sources at his command he was as unfettered as any
royal captain of the old world at the head of his own
army.
There had been a moment, earlier in the Revolution,
— and, during the evil days now close at hand, there
was another such moment, — when some faint-hearted
colonists turned their glance in search of a leader out-
side their own borders. It was suggested that America,
after the well-known example of England, should apply
for a monarch to Central Germany. Her security would
be assured if the hero of Rossbach and Zorndorf would
extend to her the protection of his sword and sceptre.
The notion, as any one who knew Frederic the Great
would have foreseen, struck him as exquisitely comic.
Whatever turn affairs might take, (such was his com-
ment on the proposal,) he should refuse any offer of
Transatlantic sovereignty, and cede, without hesitation,
all his rights to the King of England. 1 Nothing more
was heard of that fantastic scheme; but on the first
week of December, 1776, — when America was in dire
straits, — Silas Deane sent to the Committee of Secret
Correspondence at Philadelphia a despatch of which
one paragraph, for intelligible reasons, was not allowed
to be seen in print until the writer, and the recipients,
of the letter had long been in their graves. For in that
1 Le Comte de Maltzan au roi Frederic, 10 Fcvrier 1775; Le Roi
Frederic au Comte de Maltzan, 21 Fevrier 1775.
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WASHINGTON IN BOSTON
175
paragraph the envoy at Paris urged his masters at home
to direct their thoughts towards engaging a great gen-
eral, of the highest character in Europe, such as Prince
Ferdinand or Marshal Broglio, to take command of the
colonial armies. 1
That was how some men felt when the war was first
impending, and again at a subsequent period, when it
appeared likely to terminate in a rapid and complete
disaster for America. But, in the weeks which imme-
diately followed General Howe's retirement from Boston,
Washington's compatriots were so far from wanting to
borrow a marshal from France, or a prince from Ger-
many, that they would not have exchanged their own
Virginian for Hannibal or Alexander. There was, how-
ever, one American who did not over-rate George
Washington ; and that was George Washington himself.
He put in no claim to the possession of a heaven-born
genius for war, — a term which historians have so freely
applied to certain conquerors the nativity of whose
military talent might not unfairly be assigned to a very
different region. " Who would have thought," (wrote
an author of the seventeenth century,) "that Spinola,
soe young and unexpert as he was, should begin his
prentiship in armes with taking Ostend, and of the
suddaine become soe great a captaine ? Some men
grow up to be famous generalls before they have scarce
learnt the dutyes of souldiers; and others that spend
their whole time in the exercises of military discipline,
— to whom fights, sieges, batteryes, approches, and
underminings are as familiar as the wearing of their
corsletts, — are yet cleane to seeke how to manage the
highest command of an army." 2 To neither of those
two classes did Washington belong. Of him was true
1 The Revolutionary Diplomatic Correspondence of the United States ;
Edited under Direction of Gmgress by l'rancis Wharton : Washington,
Government Printing Office, 1889. The passage mentioned above does
not appear in the earlier collection of State documents arranged for pub-
lication by Mr. Sparks, under resolution of Congress of March 27, 1818.
2 History of the War in Ireland, 1641 to 1673, by Richard Sellings,
Secretary of the Irish Confederation.
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176
THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
what a famous writer said of a famous warrior, that his
proficiency in military science was the proficiency which
a man of vigorous faculties makes in any science to
which he applies his mind with earnestness and in-
dustry. 1 Before the summer of 1776 Washington had
seen plenty of hard service ; but he had never con-
ducted an extensive campaign in the open field. The
sense which he entertained of his own deficiencies
stands recorded in a generous letter referring to a
gallant officer who had given his chief some trouble
already, and was destined to give him more in the
future. 14 General Sullivan," wrote Washington, " does
not want abilities ; but he has his wants, and he has his
foibles. His wants are common to us all. He wants
experience to move upon a large scale; for the limited
and contracted knowledge, which any of us have in
military matters, stands in very little stead." 2
During five or six weeks before Washington's arrival
at New York, the city and district were committed to
the care of one of his brigadiers who went by the name
of Lord Stirling. The apparition of a nobleman on
the rolls of a Republican army is startling enough to
call for explanation. William Alexander's father had
been a gentleman of old Scottish family, who, after
the Jacobite rebellion of 171 5, had taken refuge in
America; where he became an important official, a
leading advocate, and the husband of a rich woman.
In 1756 the son went to England on public business of
some moment, and was recognised by society as a colo-
nist of good position and repute, and a scion of the
noble house of Stirling. 8 Before returning home he put
1 Macaulay on Frederic the Great.
* Washington to the President of Congress ; New York, June 17, 1776.
* The following sentence, relating to Stirling, ii taken from a London
newspaper: "Great respect was shewn, and court paid to him, by the
Scotch, particularly by Mr. Alexander Wedderburne, Drummonds the
bankers, Lord Aberdeen, and others of Scotland ; as well as by the late
Lord Northampton, Charles Townshend, and many more considerable
people on this side the Tweed ; every one of whom advised him by all
means to take up the title."
WASHINGTON IN BOSTON 1 77
in a claim to the Earldom, which already was extinct.
The prize was of a nature to inflame the imagination of
an American. The first Earl was the poet, the tutor of
Prince Henry, who helped James the First in his trans-
lation of the Psalms ; and who would have received the
profits of the work, if profits there had been, and if the
whole British people had not stoutly refused to sing
the Royal version. But that was the least of the favours
showered upon him by the Crown. He was made
Secretary of State for Scotland, and a Judge of the
Court of Session ; and he obtained the privilege of
issuing a copper coinage. In 162 1 James endowed him
with the whole territory of Nova Scotia, as well as the
County and the Lordship of Canada; and the grant
was accompanied bv the duty of recommending gentle-
men to be created Baronets at a hundred and fifty
pounds a head. The Charter was confirmed by Charles
on his accession to the throne ; and in course of time
Alexander was invested with the titles of Earl of Stir-
ling, and Viscount Canada. But to him, as to others
of the great American Proprietors, his concessions and
monopolies brought little besides vexations and embar-
rassments; and in 1640 he died bankrupt.
That was a matter of indifference to the William
Alexander of 1760, who did not need money, and who
would willingly have paid the price of a score of Nova
Scotia baronetcies in order to become the Sixth Earl
of Stirling. The case was tried. An Edinburgh jury
found for the claimant, and he was proclaimed as Earl
of Stirling at the Market Cross ; but the decision was
over-set by a Committee of the House of Lords. Alex-
ander returned to America, which was a country where
a man was at liberty to call himself anything he pleased,
except a Bishop ; and thenceforward he was Lord Stir-
ling, not only to his provincial neighbours, but to the
Royal generals and administrators, who treated him
with marked civility. His mother, seeing no reason
why an heiress should be idle, had set up a thriving
business. She made herself notable among women by
FT. II— VOL. I. N
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178 THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
selling thirty pounds worth of goods on the day after
her son was born ; and, when he reached the proper
age, she took that son into partnership. The pair lived
in a community where people who kept a store were
the equals of people who bought at it ; and Stirling held
his head high among the best. When he was forty
years old an English officer, who supplied friends in
London with New York gossip, opined that Lord
Stirling, if he played his cards prudently, might rise
to be Governor of the province. He adhered to the
Revolution from the very first, and brought strength
to the cause which he adopted ; for he was very popular
with his own party, and supremely indifferent to what
might be said or written about him by his opponents.
He had his share in the personal abuse which was
poured forth by the Loyal poets and poetasters in enor-
mous quantities ; although the entire mass of their
rhymes made fewer converts among a grave and hard-
headed people than any five pages of " Common Sense,"
or a single one of the Farmer's Letters. The ablest,
and perhaps the most ferocious, of these satirists, the
Reverend Jonathan Odell, has lampooned Stirling as
an habitual drunkard ; but it must be remembered that
the same pen denounced Washington as a perjurer and
a liar, and applied to Jay, — who was a purist among
statesmen, and in after life.a revered magistrate, — the
epithet of "Satan's Darling Son." 1
The worst that could be told about Stirling might be
conveyed by a quotation taken from verses of a very
different order. When seated at the head of his own
table he did not love
1 " Or what if Washington should close his scene,
Could none succeed him ? Is there not a Greene ?
Knave after knave as easy we could join
As new emissions of the paper coin."
That is a very mild sample of Odcll's judgements on his prominent con-
temporaries. Such strictures, even when proceeding from a Church of
England clergyman, cannot fairly be received as evidence against char-
acter. John Jay became the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of
the United States.
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WASHINGTON IN BOSTON
179
"a lingering bottle
Which with the landlord makes too long a stand,
Leaving all claretless the unmoistened throttle;
Especially with politics on hand."
Politics were always on hand in America from the pass-
ing of the Stamp Act onwards ; and they were talked
with jovial emphasis and unanimity around Stirling's
well-spread board. He was celebrated for his hospital-
ity in town and camp alike ; and no staff-officer, with a
message to deliver, ever grudged a long ride if only the
last stage of it brought him to Stirling's quarters. These
quarters were all the more attractive to youthful chivalry
because Lady Stirling, who never left her lord for long,
was everywhere attended by a bevy of girls as clever
and .engaging as any in America. 1 Stirling was a care-
ful and watchful commander, who prided himself on his
acquaintance with the technical side of his profession,
and who, as the war progressed, shook off the martinet,
and became a practical soldier of considerable value in
the field. He was in most of Washington's engage-
ments; and there was sure to be plenty of tough and
steady fighting in the quarter towards which Stirling
and his division had been ordered. He showed a burly
figure, and afresh-coloured visage, in the front of battle.
"My Lord Stirling," said a Hessian Colonel, "looks
as much like my Lord Granby as one egg does like
another; " and every Englishman, who cares for a good
portrait by Reynolds, knows how Lord Granby looked.
Stirling died just at the moment when peace was arranged
between England and the United States, deeply re-
gretted by his chief, whose beautiful letter to Lady Stir-
ling may well stand in history as her husband's epitaph. 2
1 Lady Stirling was the mother of Lady Mary Watts and Lady Kitty
Duer. She herself was a sister of Governor Livingston of New Jersey ;
and his three daughters had a home in their aunt's household. One of
them married Chief Justice Jay, and in after days gave the law to New
York drawing-rooms. Indeed, all the five ladies belonged to that first
dynasty of American fashion which came into power when the war was
over. Life of Martha Washington, by Anne Hollingworth Wharton,
1 Washington to Lady Stirling ; Newbury, January 20, 1783.
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THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
Within twenty-four hours after Boston became his
own, Washington began his arrangements for the
defence of the middle colonies. On the eighteenth of
March a strong advanced guard was despatched by
land to Norwich in Connecticut, and thence by water
to New York. The rest of the army followed, in divi-
sions ; and on the thirteenth of April the Commander-in-
Chief himself arrived, and established his headquarters
within the city. He left General Ward in charge at
Boston ; — an easy billet, if the old man still had a mind
for employment. One antique hero, at any rate, was
now provided for as honourably to himself, and with as
little disadvantage to the public service, as if he were a
time-worn British veteran installed in the Governor's
house at Chelsea Hospital. Far other was the lot which
awaited Washington, who was at once confronted by the
necessity for a decision which brought to the test his
moral qualifications for the supreme direction of a great
war. The American army in Canada could not be
saved unless it was speedily and largely strengthened ;
and Congress begged Washington to reinforce it with-
out delay. He was asked to denude himself, when he
had nothing to spare, in order to promote operations
of which the success, purchased at his expense, would
redound to the credit of another. Excuses were at
hand, such as it would not have been difficult to present
in the form of weighty reasons. The temptation was
great, and the mental struggle severe \ but that was the
sort of conflict from which George Washington never
came off a loser. He detached ten regiments, as good
as the best he had, and embarked them on their voyage
up the Hudson under the orders of General Sullivan.
When the last battalion had sailed northwards, Wash-
ington was left with the prospect of having the main
British army at any moment upon his hands, and with
only six thousand infantry fit for duty.
These were Continental soldiers ; regulars in name,
although enlisted for a single twelvemonth, and devoid
of the very slightest intention to remain under arms a
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WASHINGTON'S NEW YORK ARMY
181
day longer than the end of December 1776. But the
pressing dangers ahead of them made it necessary that
their numbers should be supplemented from any source
which was immediately available ; and Congress ordered
out to their assistance a multitude of raw recruits, com-
pared with whom, whatever their own defects in point
of discipline might be, they were as the palace-guard at
Potsdam, or the Musketeers of the French Household.
Washington spared a fortnight towards the end of May
for a journey to Philadelphia. He represented to peo-
ple in authority the fearful risk of entrusting New York,
the grand magazine of America, — as well as the mouth
of the Hudson river, which was the military highway
of the Continent, — to a mere handful of defenders.
Men of some sort had to be procured ; and none were
forthcoming unless he was empowered to draw freely
upon the militia of the neighbouring provinces. It was
a poor resource at the best. Months before, when it was
suspected at Boston that Howe, instead of making for
Halifax, might sail straight for New York, three thousand
of the Connecticut and New Jersey militia had been called
in to garrison the city. There were no funds in the Treas-
ury to pay them ; and they had gone back grumbling to
their villages, whence it would not be easy on a second
occasion to induce them, or their neighbours, to stir. The
personal influence of Washington, as always, quickened
the resolve of Congress. It was agreed to increase his
army at New York by thirteen thousand eight hundred
militiamen, and to form in the vicinity a flying camp,
(an ominous expression,) of ten thousand more.
Late in August, on the eve of his first collision with
the enemy, Washington had collected a very consider-
able gathering of fighting men ; or rather of men who
came out for the purpose of fighting if a battle was not
put off too long to suit their convenience. Armed,
half-armed, and unarmed; young and old; loyal and
disaffected ; 1 engaged to serve for five more months, for
1 The militia of some counties laid hands on the local Tories, and
brought them along to be employed as fatigue-men, on the plea that they
were less dangerous in camp than at home.
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THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
six weeks, for four weeks, or for as long as they felt
inclined ; — the American levies of all sorts and descrip-
tions were reckoned at something between twenty and
twenty-five thousand. Three thousand of these were
on detached service ; and five thousand, (the most con-
stant quantity under any heading in the official returns,)
were reported as sick. It was probably the largest
army that Washington ever commanded ; and it cer-
tainly was the worst, from causes which reflected little
discredit on him or on his compatriots. Indeed, the
contrast between the troops who were mustered at New
York in August 1776, and the troops who were dis-
banded at New York in December 1783, was in a high
degree honourable both to the leader and to the fol-
lowers. They never wearied out his patience ; and he
at length obtained from them, after more than one
disappointment, obedience and devotion in the fullest
measure. There have seldom been better soldiers, of
every arm and in every rank, than those Americans
who, after the war was over, divested themselves of
their ragged uniforms, and became civilians at the first
moment when their country had no longer need of them
as professional warriors. 1
It is difficult to pronounce in general terms upon the
value of the American militia during the War of Inde-
pendence. Some of their feats, if we take into con-
sideration the quality of their opponents, have seldom
been surpassed except in legendary warfare; but at
other times they fought poorly, and proved themselves
hopelessly unequal to the demands of a long and trying
campaign. New England farmers, aided by backwoods-
1 "You know the steps by which Washington succeeded in forming an
army. At first, men engaged for a single campaign, mixed with militia
and volunteers ; then paid soldiers, their mutiny, the new regulations,
and at length the military constitution unanimously accepted by the
United States. The excellent condition of the Continental troops, as we
saw them at the review of King's Ferry, before our departure for France,
will remain in our eyes as not the least among the triumphs of the hero
of America." This is a passage from a letter written by General Mathieu
Dumas, and published after he had served many years, and with great dis-
tinction, in Napoleon's Grand Army.
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WASHINGTON'S NEW YORK ARMY
183
men of the Pennsylvanian border, captured at Saratoga
a splendid army which had advanced beyond its depth
into an ocean of primaeval forest In October 1780 a
similar victory, on a smaller scale, was achieved at
King's Mountain in North Carolina by bear-hunters
and wild Indian fighters from the regions which after-
wards were known as Kentucky and Tennessee. It
was an occasion when the North Carolina militia per-
formed their share of the work ; and yet that very
militia could not be trusted to keep their place in line
when it came to a ranged battle on an open ground. 1
American minute-men did well, and sometimes did
wonders ; but they required two conditions in order to
show themselves to advantage. It was essential that
the circumstances should be favourable to their method
of fighting, and that they should have begun with a
success. Both those conditions prevailed during the
earlier phases of the Revolutionary War. Lexington
had put the colonists in heart; Bunker's Hill did any-
thing rather than discourage them ; and, after those two
affairs were over, they had but to sit quiet behind solid
earthworks, eating varied and ample rations, and specu-
lating on the date when the British inside Boston would
be reduced to eat horses. Lafayette, after long experi-
ence, reported to the French Ministry that American
regulars had as much courage and true discipline as
their adversaries, and were more hardy and patient
than any European troops with whom he was acquainted;
but that their militia, on the other hand, were only armed
peasants, who had sometimes fought, but who would
be most usefully employed in the works of a siege. 2
Their first campaign had been a long siege, and little
1 Nathanael Greene, who always asked and got from his troops the
utmost of which he thought them capable, promised these Carolinians at
Guildford Court House that, if they would stand long enough to fire two
volleys, he would engage that his Continental troops should do the rest.
But, as soon as Lord Cornwallis sent his people forward, the militia broke
and ran, and never stopped retreating until, (to use the words of their
disgusted General,) they had gone home to kiss their wives and sweethearts.
2 Letter of 1781 from Lafayette to the Count de Vergcnncs.
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1 84 THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
else ; but they were now to have a taste of all the opera-
tions, incidents, and emergencies of active warfare.
The host which had been assembled to oppose the inva-
sion of the central colonies had many characteristics of
a tribe in arms. " A number of aged gentlemen, of the
first society in the town of Waterbury, embodied them-
selves, and nominated their officers. When they were
ordered to New York, this company was the first that
reached the place of rendezvous. They were twenty-
four in number; and their united ages reached one
thousand. They are all married men, and left behind
a hundred and fifty-nine children and grandchildren."
That account came from Connecticut; and at another
town, nearer to the field of action, the announcement of
National Independence evoked an equally remarkable
ebullition of martial ardour. An effigy of George the
Third, with a crown of feathers like that of an Indian
chief, was solemnly hanged and burned ; and then the
older citizens of the locality, " to the age of seventy and
upwards, formed themselves into a company, determined
at the risk of their lives to defend the free and indepen-
dent States. May such a shining example stimulate
every father in America to follow their aged brethren
here ! " It would have been well for General Washing-
ton if all his patriarchs had arrayed themselves in
special and separate companies, so that they might
have been sent back to their firesides after their inspir-
ing story had gone the round of the newspapers, and
before they had caught their deaths of cold. Unfortu-
nately, grandfathers were impartially enlisted through-
out every militia battalion of the continent; and the
case was sometimes all the worse when they brought
their grandsons with them. An English officer, who
spent several years as a prisoner in one State or another,
had leisure and opportunity for observing the weak sides
of the American military system. You would see, (he
said,) in the ranks of the militia a soldier of sixty
marching next a boy of sixteen ; a sturdy negro, and an
old decrepit white man limping by his side; most of
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WASHINGTON'S NEW YORK ARMY
them wearing great bushy wigs, and presenting a spec-
tacle to which nothing could do justice except the pencil
of Hogarth. 1
These veterans, according to one of their admirers,
were a theme for Homer; and undoubtedly they re-
sembled the Nestor of that poet in the facility for copious
dissertation by which they enlivened the camp, and the
comparisons which they drew between the generals of
their youth and the degenerate race of strategists by
whom they now were commanded. But, whatever
might be their failings, at all events they brought with
them respectability; — an attribute the largest possible
infusion of which was needed in order to counteract
those baser elements which, for the first time, were dis-
agreeably prominent in the colonial army. The men
who swarmed in upon Lord Percy's line of retreat on
the memorable nineteenth of April, and who then
stayed with the colours until they had taken Boston,
were the pick of the population, — true volunteers,
actuated by public motives. But in the summer of
1776 the institution of a compulsory ballot had swept
good, bad, and indifferent into the State militia. Not a
few men of" questionable antecedents, whom the fortune
of the lot had spared in their own persons, entered the
ranks as hired substitutes ; for there already were
plenty of timid and slothful householders eager to
purchase exemption from service, and prepared to
satisfy the demands of a tariff which, as the war pro-
ceeded, rose to famine prices. 2 The contrast between
the force which had lain in front of Boston, and the
force which at present occupied New York, soon became
painfully visible. Colonel Reed, the Adjutant General,
informed President Hancock that the army was com-
posed of a greater mixture than any which had yet
1 American Archiv es, July 23 and November 29, 1776. Travcli through
the interior parts of America by an Officer ; Letter XCVIII.
- •' A rich and well-to-do militia man does not serve himself. He hires a
substitute, and pays for two months as much as a thousand French
Crowns. 1 ' Baron de Kalb to the Count dc Broglie ; Valley Forge, Decem-
ber 1777.
1 86 THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
been collected, and was full of crime. There were men,
(he wrote,) to whom thirty-nine lashes was a con-
temptible punishment. When they had received that
allowance, they would offer in the hearing of their
comrades to take as much more for a pint of rum. 1
In the case of a people endowed with valour, and
not deficient in volubility, the experience of active
service soon makes it evident that those two qualities
are not always united in the same individual. In
America especially, where national self-knowledge is
stimulated by a national sense of humour, men discover,
at an early period in every successive war, that heroes
of the tavern and the street corner are in a large pro-
portion sluggards on the march, and skulkers in action.
14 When I see," wrote Colonel Reed, " how few who
talked so largely of death and honour are around me,
and that those who are here are those from whom it
was least expected, I am lost in wonder and surprise.
Your noisy Sons of Liberty are, I find, the very quietest
in the field. An engagement, or even the expectation
of one, gives a wonderful insight into character." 2
Loud politicians often showed themselves tame soldiers ;
and professional bullies were invariably among. the very
worst. A Federal general, eminent in the War of the
Secession, expressly says that champions who had been
the terror of their native place in time of peace, — whose
features were disfigured by traces of the prize-ring, or
of conflicts with a rival volunteer fire company, — were
no better than cringing cowards in an honourable
encounter where death stared them in the face. 8
The relative worth for military purposes of a ruffian,
1 Colonel Joseph Reed to the President of Congress ; New York, July 25,
1776. American Archives.
-Colonel Reed to his wife; September 6, 1776.
• "The Philosophy of Courage," by General Horace Porter ; a paper
which, perfect in its class, appeared in the Century Magazine of June
1888. General Porter justly contrasts these noisy braggarts with the men
who, on the evening before the assault at Cold Harbor, were seen calmly
and silently writing their names and home-addresses on slips of paper,
and pinning them to the back of their coats ; so that next morning their
bodies might be recognised, and their fate made known to their families.
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WASHINGTON'S NEW YORK ARMY % 187
and of a plain quiet man, is an old story, — as old as
war. 1 In the summer of 1776 a Pennsylvanian captain,
(for the drudgery of enlistment, in the American Army,
devolved not upon the sergeants, but on the com-
missioned officers,) had got hold of a recruit who enter-
tained his comrades with stories of the race-course and
the cock-pit, and froze their blood by dark hints of the
fate reserved for any one who ventured to trifle with
him, and with his like. "There," he would say, "is a
fellow that has not his match in the country. See what
a set of teeth he has! A man's thumb would be nothing
to them." This worthy had been introduced to the regi-
ment by a sporting gentleman, who recommended him
for a soldier on the ground that he would be no loss to
the countryside, and that he would stop a bullet as well
as anybody. That however, as soon as shots began to
fly, proved to be the very last thing which he had an
idea of doing ; and thenceforward whenever his com-
pany advanced to skirmish, he was left behind to guard
the colours.
But, though there were more black sheep than could
be wished among the American militia, the great ma-
jority of them were as decent, worthy people as ever
marched out of step. They had the virtues of civilians ;
and many of them, when they joined the camps around
New York, to all intents and purposes were civilians
still. Some battalions arrived at the front without
having learned the rudiments of training. In Virginia,
the most military community of the whole continent, a
spectator who had seen one of the independent com-
panies put through what, at that distance from Berlin,
was called the Prussian exercise, spoke of the perform-
1 Tacitus states it as a recognised fact that gladiators made a poor
figure among the swordsmen in a Roman battle. Xenophon tells of a
noted Thessalian boxer, who, during the Retreat of the Ten Thousand, dis-
tinguished himself only as a marauder, a mutineer, and a malingerer.
And, as long ago as the Iliad itself, a pugilist, to whom no one in the
whole Grecian army before Troy could stand up for five minutes, confessed
without reserve, and apparently without shame, that he was of very small
count in the line of speara.
1 88 THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
ance as a mere burlesque. The General Orders, which
Washington issued in rapid succession to his New York
army, dealt for the most part with very elementary
points of discipline. Captains were instructed, over
and over again, to see that, in the presence of the enemy,
every man had twenty-four cartridges in his pouch, and
a good flint well fixed in the lock of his piece ; colonels
were informed that they must break sentries of the
habit of sitting down, and laying by their muskets,
before they could shoot them for sleeping at their posts ;
and subalterns were desired, when the line was turned
out on ceremonial occasions, to salute by taking off
their hats, until they had mastered the correct method
of presenting their fusees.
A very diligent reader of American annals has
remarked that it must always prove a source of wonder
to the scientific soldier, and of mystery to the historical
student, how the Revolutionary war could ever have
been carried through. 1 At the critical moment of each
campaign the militia habitually evinced a desire to go
back to their homes; and they belonged to a people
who usually take the shortest way to get whatever they
may want. It must be admitted that a military life pre-
sented itself to them under the least seductive aspects.
The pride and pomp of war were often represented
in their case by a strip of cloth, which once had been
red or yellow, sewed on to the sleeve of their upper
garment. Comforts they had none. The men of the
contingent, which marched for Canada under General
Sullivan, possessed one shirt apiece, and often not a
waistcoat in a company ; and that expedition was fitted
out as lavishly as the slender resources at the command
of Washington would admit. The pay which the
militia received, — or rather, to speak more accurately,
the pay which was in arrear to them, — was computed
on a lower scale than that of the Continental troops.
They were unprovided with blankets, tents, or shoes;
1 Introduction to the private papers of George Clinton, by Hugh Hast-
ings, State Historian: New York and Albany, 1899.
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WASHINGTON'S NEW YORK ARMY 189
and, at the end of the severe campaign which now was
opening, an English officer observed, not without a
touch of sympathy, that the few coats which they had
among them were out at elbows, and that a whole regi-
ment seldom could display a whole pair of breeches.
They were often in hot quarrel with their military
superiors. Officers of a company were chosen by the
company, under a system which ensured the most
absolute freedom of election. Indeed, wherever coer-
cion took place, it did not come from above. A
Maryland colonel had called his regiment together, in
order to poll for a field officer. They met on another
day from that which he had appointed; they refused
to let him be present at the counting; and, when
he insisted on his right to inspect the votes, they
threatened to throw him over an adjoining fence. In
fine weather, and commodious quarters, the relations
between all ranks were pleasant enough. The Adju-
tant General of the army mentioned in a letter to his
wife that he had seen a captain of the Connecticut
Light Horse shaving a trooper on the parade-ground.
But, when the service became hard, and the discipline
severe, privates were apt to regard their officers as
constituents view a representative whose political con-
duct has deceived their legitimate expectations. " Cap-
tain Watkins and his men," (thus ran an official report,)
" are on very ill terms. The Captain has beat some of
them. He says he has great cause. They say he has
none. Some of the men have said that nothing shall
induce them to stay in the company under him." 1
It did not, however, require a special or a personal
grievance to turn the thoughts of American militiamen
in the direction of their homes. The peculiar condi-
tions of their service were well known to British Min-
isters, and ranked high among those circumstances
which encouraged the Cabinet to believe that the
colonies would soon be brought to terms. Mr. Paul
1 Letter to the Maryland Council of Safety; September 1776. Ameri-
can Archives,
1Q0 THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
Wentworth, a steadfast partisan of the Crown, exposed
the weakness of. New England in a series of extremely
able letters addressed to Downing Street The most
cultivated parts of the country, (this gentleman wrote,)
contained no spare labourers ; so that the farmers and
their families mutually assisted each other to reap their
harvests. He had remarked, too, that there were more
females than males among them ; and, from their pro-
lific nature, and the plenty of food and raiment, a great
proportion of children was to be found in every farm.
From those facts the writer deduced the cheering con-
clusions that the devastation of the rural districts would
cause acute and wide-spread suffering, and that the
militia would be for ever running off to get in their crops,
and protect their wives and little ones. Each of the two
inferences was correct by itself : but in the long run the
one neutralised the other. The horrible misery inflicted
in the Jerseys by British foragers, and Hessian plun-
derers, did more than all the proclamations of Con-
gress, and all the sermons of militant Whig clergymen,
to convince the farmers that the only method of safe-
guarding their property and families was to remain to-
gether in the front, and keep the invader well outside
their borders.
But, in the summer and fall of 1776, that truth
had not been taken to heart by those it most concerned.
The colonists gratefully acknowledged that it was a
wonderful harvest with which Heaven had blessed
their land ; 1 and to an honest militiaman, who could cut
his swath much more neatly than he could do his fac-
ings, it savoured of impiety that the precious gifts of a
bountiful Providence should not be duly reaped and
garnered. " Their complaints are without number ; "
(the colonel of a regiment wrote). 44 Some have got
ten or twelve loads of hay cut, and not a man left to
take it up. Some have got a great quantity of grass to
cut. Some have not finished hoeing corn. Some, if
not all, have got their ploughing to do, for sowing their
1 American Archives; November 1 776.
WASHINGTON'S NEW YORK ARMY 19 1
winter grain. Some have all their families sick, and
not a person left to take care of them." 1 In the absence
of the farmers, the work was mainly done by women ;
a sight strange, and almost unnatural, to a people which
already had begun to consider that sex as too good
to be employed on field-labour. General Greene told
Washington that the harvest throughout New York and
Connecticut had been generally got in by wives and
daughters, assisted by the men whose advanced age
rendered them unfit for the army; — and, to judge by
those who thought themselves young enough to serve,
that age must have been advanced indeed. Ladies of
the first consideration, without regard for their dignity
or their complexions, set the example of self-help to
those around them. Towards the end of August, at the
Forks of Brandy wine, girls were harnessing the ploughs,
and preparing fallows for the seed, on the very fields
where, a twelvemonth from that date, a costly crop of
human life was reaped. 2
Militiamen, whose families were domesticated near
the Indian border, had a more poignant motive for go-
ing home to keep watch and ward beneath their own
roof-trees. The riflemen, indeed, who came from the
Southern colonies, were spared one most serious anxiety ;
for danger was not apprehended from the slaves. Lord
Dunmore, the Governor of Virginia, — apparently for-
getting that George the Third had upheld the slave-
trade against the earnest wish of the colony, — did his
utmost to provoke a servile insurrection. He proclaimed
freedom to all negroes, appertaining to rebels, "who
1 Colonel Fitch to Governor Trumbull of Connecticut ; August 1776.
On the 1 2th of the same month Hezekiah Howell, of Blaggs Clove, wrote
to General Clinton what may be regarded as a specimen letter. " By
your calling Captain WoohuPs Company I am entirely stript of Hands to
carry on my business, having but one Negro and a boy left with me, and
the most of my hay to get, (no hands are to be had for hire,) besides if
they are continued long I shall be unable to sow any winter grain. If it
is anyways consistent with your duty I should take it as a favour to let
either my son or grandson Return home as soon as possible."
a Greene to Washington ; July 25, 1776. Private letter of August 27, in
the American Archives.
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192 THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
would take arms against their masters " ; and Virginians
never forgot or forgave the threat. 1 The Governor's
invitation, however, was not heeded by those to whom it
was addressed. The negroes refused to rise, continued
to eat their rations peaceably, and even made a show of
working; but, although they remained loyal to then-
owner, nothing except his bodily presence could keep
them from being lazy. It was a poor life for a small
planter, distracted by the thought of his tobacco left
unhoed, and of his field-hands revelling in idleness and
rude plenty, while he was marching wearily from defeat
to defeat, empty and barefoot, and with a gun longer
than himself on his aching shoulder.
It was the most difficult thing in the world, (so Wash-
ington declared,) to know in what manner to conduct
himself with respect to the militia. " If you do not be-
gin to raise them many days before they are wanted,
you cannot have them in time. If you do, they get tired
and return, besides being under but very little order or
government while in service." 2 A general complained
that the army was mainly composed of raw levies, per-
petually fluctuating between the camp and their farms.
According to another officer, they had come and gone
in such shoals that His Excellency could never tell for
two days together the strength which he had at any
1 A letter from Antigua, in a London newspaper, relates that Lord
Dunmore's offer to emancipate and arm the slaves of Virginia " had
incensed the whole continent, and inflamed the minds of many who
before were pacifically inclined." The Governor's former subjects dwelt
with satisfaction upon the real, or lupposcd, details of his exit from the
province. " A nine-pound ball from the Lower Battery entered the ship's
quarters, and beat in a large timber, from the splinters of which I-ord
Dunmore got wounded about the legs, and had all his valuable china
smashed about his ears. It is said that his Lordship was exceedingly
alarmed, and roared out; ' Good God, that I should have come to this ! ' "
American Archives; July 1776. The opinion entertained about Lord
Dunmore by American loyalists was the same as that held by American
rebels. "The unimportant, insignificant, fribbling Governor of Virginia
has gone back to England." So Judge Curwen remarks in his Journal
of December 1 776.
* Washington to the President of the New York Convention ; New York,
August 30, 1776.
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WASHINGTON'S NEW YORK ARMY
193
given post. One element of uncertainty was soon re-
moved from Washington's calculations ; for, after the first
success of the British, his numbers no longer fluctuated,
but sank steadily by thousands every week. The militia
altogether ceased to come; and they went in larger
parties than ever. There was no stopping them ; and it
was useless even to talk of recovering them by force. 1
All through September they departed by whole regi-
ments, by half regiments, and by companies. They
carried away their arms, and their ammunition too, at a
time when it was almost worth its weight in silver ; as
well as other Government stores which, to their artless
fancy, seemed likely to conduce to the comfort of the
folks at home. 2 Within a fortnight after fighting com-
menced, the Connecticut militia had been reduced from
six thousand, to less than two thousand, rank and file.
Washington bitterly exclaimed that to place any depend-
ence upon such a force was resting on a broken staff.
" Men just dragged from the tender scenes of domestic
life, unaccustomed to the din of arms, and totally un-
acquainted with every kind of military drill, are timid,
and ready to fly from their own shadows. The sudden
change in their manner of living, particularly in their
lodging, brings on sickness in many, impatience in all,
and such an unconquerable desire of returning to their
respective homes that it not only produces shameful de-
sertions among themselves, but infuses the like spirit
into others."*
1 * By the enclosed return of my brigade, you will observe that there are
wanting, to complete, 596 men. I know it is my duty to cause deserters to
be apprehended. I can't. If I send officers and parties of faithful men
after them, I thereby weaken the army. The deserters hear of them in
their neighbourhood, know their business, and, (I am sorry to add,) are
too frequently aided in evading my guards." General George Clinton to
Washington; September 8, 1776.
a One of the fugitives was detected in possession of a cannon-ball,
which he intended as a present to his mother, for the purpose of pounding
her mustard.
8 Public Papers of George Clinton, Vol. L Memoin of a Life chiefly
passed in Pennsylvania. Washington to the President of Congress;
September 2 and 24, 1 776.
FT. II.— VOL. L o
THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
The militia would have done less ill if it had been
better commanded. "We want men of knowledge to
instruct us," was the prayer of those among the rank
and file who aspired to become real soldiers ; 1 but the
officers, who should have been the teachers, in many
cases had nothing of value to impart. European Gov-
ernments already recognised in theory, though by no
means uniformly in practice, that military commissions
ought to be conferred upon men who had been carefully
picked, and minutely and rigorously trained. That,
however, was a counsel of perfection which, in the
hurry of a sudden war, the Americans held themselves
excused from even attempting to attain. Congress
made a Colonel or a Major with little regard to his pro-
fessional acquirements, or his personal qualities. The
result sometimes astonished French generals belonging
to a service in which the field-officers were young noble-
men of high spirit and courtly manners; or veterans,
scarred at Fontenoy, who had spent half a lifetime in
putting the regiments of the Bourbonnais, or the Royal
Dcux-ponts, through their complicated and stately
manoeuvres. 14 One risks nothing," said Baron de Kalb,
" in calling ' Colonel ' a stranger who accosts you. The
army swarms with them." 2 And the Baron then pro-
the taunt which these gentlemen occasionally applied
to each other in their cups ; 11 Did Congress see you be-
fore they appointed you ? " Captains and Lieutenants
were elected by the soldiers ; whose choice, in a bad
regiment, was dictated by unwarlike, and often very
unworthy, considerations. The process had unpleasant
features even in the most virtuous and patriotic com-
munities. The journal of a New England minute-man,
himself a true hero, faithfully depicts the strong and
the weak sides of the American military character. On
Sunday the twenty-third of April, 1775, Amos Farns-
1 Address to the Virginian Convention; July 29, 1775.
* Baron de Kalb to the Due de Broglie. Henry Stevens's Facsimile
of tht Correspondence during the American Revolution.
details amply justifying
WASHINGTON'S NEW YORK ARMY
195
worth, of Groton in Middlesex county, heard a fine dis-
course on the words, " Thou therefore endure hardness,
as a good soldier of Jesus Christ." On Sunday the thir-
tieth the Reverend Mr. Goodridge, in an excellent sermon
from a stirring text, " incoridged us to go and fite for
our Land and Contry, saying we Did not do our Duty if
we did not stand up now." And yet the intervening
week was apparently spent neither in prayer nor in
drill, but "a Strugling with the offisers which shold be
the hiest in offise." 1
Quarrelling too often did not cease when the election
was over. Officers were for ever bickering about ques-
tions of rank and promotion, with the susceptibility of
military men, and the breadth of language familiar to
civilians whose vocabulary had been invigorated by the
constant pursuit of local politics. Discord within the
ranks was sometimes very little mitigated even by
the most imminent danger from without. When Howe
began his forward movement in Long Island, the officers
of a New Hampshire battalion were not on speaking
terms in consequence of a disagreement as to whether
the companies should be marched to public worship on
Sunday morning together or separate. 2 That same sum-
mer a gentleman in the South Carolina militia informed
his State authorities that the Indians were in arms on
their frontier, along the banks of the river Saluda. " I
am afraid," he said, " the burden of the war will fall
on this regiment. The people over the river will do
1 Amos Farnsworth's Diary; published in the Proceedings of the
Massachusetts Historical Society for 1899. Mr. Goodridge preached from
Judges xx. 22 and 23 : " more particularly the last Clause in the 23rd
verse." That verse runs: "And the children of Israel went up and wept
before the Ix>rd until even, and asked counsel of the Lord, saying, Shall I
go up again to battle against the children of Benjamin my brother? And
the Lord said, Go up against him." They had already gone up against
him once, on the 19th of April, when Farnsworth "came to Lexington,
whare much hurt was done to the houses thare. But they was forsed to re-
treat, tho thay was more numerous than we. And I saw many Ded Regu-
lars by the way."
*"Our Colonel," (the Major wrote,) "will not talk with me on the
subject, but a great deal about me."
o 2
196 THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
nothing. They grumble at being commanded by a
major. If Williamson is fit to command an expedition,
he certainly ought to have a much higher rank than any
of these chaps." In the course of a month the whole
district had been over-run by savages, and the unfortu-
nate writer of those lines had been shot down, and
scalped while still alive. 1 Towards the end of August
one of Washington's brigadiers represented himself as
having shifted his quarters from New York to Eliza-
bethtown Point, " to be with the men, and enure them
to discipline ; which, by my distance from the camp,
considering what scurvy subaltern officers we are like to
have while they are in the appointment of the Mo-
bility, I found it impossible to introduce. And the
worst men, (was there a degree above the superlative,)
would still be pejorated by having been fellow-soldiers
with that discipline-hating, good-living-loving, to eter-
nal fame damned, coxcombical crew we lately had from
Philadelphia." 3
That letter was one among a hundred others which
betokened a condition of feeling productive of endless
scandal, and immeasurable danger. At the moment
when every effort was required to check Carleton's
advance from Canada, General Schuyler reported that
he saw with deep affliction the unhappy jealousy occa-
sioned by those colonial differences which reigned in
the Northern army. 8 Washington, in a General Order,
entreated officers and soldiers to consider that they
could not more effectually assist the enemy than by
making divisions among themselves; that the honour
and success of the army, and the safety of their bleed-
ing country, depended upon their harmony ; and that
things would only go well if the provinces were sincerely
united in a common cause, and all local distinctions
1 letter from Francis Salvador; July 18, 1776.
■ This officer who used, the more forcibly to express his disgust, a Latin
compound which he had never found in Johnson's dictionary, was William
Livingston, Brigadier General of the New Jersey Militia, and afterwards
Governor of his State.
» General Philip Schuyler to the President of Congress; July 17, 1776.
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WASHINGTON'S NEW YORK ARMY 1 97
sunk in the name of an American. 1 The earnestness
of the Commander-in-Chief's appeal is explained by the
peculiar composition of the force under his immediate
orders, which included contingents from the entire con-
tinent. Throughout that army provincial prejudice was
unusually bitter, and exceptionally vocal; and it took
the form of reflections cast by the officers of one State
upon the social standing of officers who were natives of
another. New York was a colony which had a plentiful
supply of rich and leisured proprietors; while it con-
tributed very few battalions to the defence of the Revo-
lution. It was acknowledged on all hands that the
officers of those battalions were men of the world, who
knew how to impress upon those beneath them a sincere
belief that levelling principles were incompatible with
good soldiership. A New York officer, people said,
might be distinguished without a badge ; but among the
tents of the New Jersey, and Maryland, and Pennsyl-
vania regiments, an observer, with an eye to race and
breeding, looked around in vain for the gentry of the
country. 2 It was even remarked that, — while the aris-
tocracy of the Old Dominion might be found on the
staff, and, (at a later period of the war,) in the cavalry,
— a Virginian infantry colonel was marked out by the
colour of his cockade rather than by his address and his
appearance. That was asserted, or rather was whis-
pered, because Virginians were accustomed to use a
short way with critics ; but, if the idleness which pre-
ceded active hostilities had been much prolonged, cap-
tains and subalterns from the most pacific colonies would
have been sending challenges like so many Southern
planters. A few days before the General Order exhort-
ing to unity and mutual tolerance was published,
Nathanael Greene informed Washington that two offi-
cers had fallen out, and had appointed the next
morning to fight. They knew that he knew it; and
he was perplexed what course to adopt, inasmuch
1 Orderly Book of August I, 1776.
a Ptnnsylvanian Memoirs, chapter vi.
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THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
as duelling contravened all law, whether civil or
military. 1
While the Southern and Middle Colonies had their
own dislikes and preferences among themselves, they all
joined in decrying the New Englanders. These latter
complained, with as much dignity as such complaint
admitted, that Georgians and Carolinians habitually
spoke of them as damned Yankees. 2 One Southern gen-
eral treated New England regimental officers with
scanty deference, going so far as to refrain from offer-
ing them a drink under circumstances when they had
every right to expect one. A court martial, comprising
a majority of Southern judges, acquitted with honour a
Maryland lieutenant who had been wanting in becom-
ing respect, and prompt obedience, towards a Northern
brigadier. 8 Even General Putnam, on horse-back in
his summer costume, with a hanger belted across his
brawny shoulders over a waistcoat without sleeves,
excited hilarity rather than enthusiasm in a martial
dandy from Baltimore, blazing in scarlet and buff, like
a British line-officer, and distinguished "by the most
fashionably-cut coat, the most maccaroni cocked hat,
and the hottest blood of the Union." Putnam, (so the
talk ran,) was brave, and had a certain honest manli-
ness about him ; but he was not what the time required.
There was justice in that observation, and not much
ill-nature. The part of the farmer-captain was already
played out, and the exigencies of more regular warfare
now demanded another type of leader; but the old
1 General Greene to Washington ; July 25, 1 776.
a Charles Gushing to his brother; July 8, 1776. Authorities on this
point are painfully abundant.
8 The privates from the various colonies got on together more pleas-
antly than their officers. " A traffic was soon established between the
common soldiers from the Hast, and the Pennsylvanians. This consisted
in a barter of the ration of rum for that of molasses. The Yankees did
not care for the first, and our Irishmen could very well dispense with the
latter." Chapters v., vi., and vii. of the Penmylvanian Memoirs pro-
vide a curious and authentic account of what men thought about each
other at the moment, in contrast to much that is written of them in
history.
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WASHINGTON'S NEW YORK ARMY 1 99
man's fame is indissolubly connected with that stage of
the contest when he performed, in every meaning of the
term, yeoman's service to his country.
The Northern, (or as New Yorkers and Pcnnsyl-
vanians usually called them, the Eastern,) provinces
had, at the call of duty, poured forth enormous masses
of armed men from every class except the wealthiest.
Those who came from that class were singularly well
read in military history, and displayed a remarkable
aptitude for utilising in the field the ideas which they
had thought out in the study ; but they were very few.
The higher education, especially in Massachusetts, was
mostly on the other side of politics. Of loyalists who
sailed from Boston, in the wake of Howe's retreat, one
in five had been at the university. It may be doubted
whether, among the officers of the militia regiments
which were besieging the town, one in fifty had been a
Harvard man. Harvard showed quite another record
during the war of the Secession. In the four years
following the spring of 1861 twenty-nine of her sons
died of exposure and camp epidemics, and sixty-nine
by the enemy's fire. In dead alone, her contribution
towards the maintenance of national unity as nearly as
possible equalled what was then a full year's entry of
her students. But in 1 776 the spirit of the place was
altogether different. Harvard, up to the very eve of
the Revolution, was a temple of privilege, in which the
scholars were ranked according to the dignity of family. 1
This system, — the closest imitation which a colony
could produce of the institution of fellow-commoners
and gentlemen-commoners at the English universities,
— survived, but not for long, the up-turning of Ameri-
1 John Adams stood fourteenth in a class of twenty-four ; and he would
have stood lower still but that, although his father was a hard-working
farmer, his mother had been a Boylston of Brookline. A much more
exalted academical position was allotted to the son of a colonel, who
belonged to no less a family than the Chandlers of Worcester ; but of
whom nothing is recorded except that he emigrated to Halifax, and left
behind hi in at his death seven pairs of silk stockings and two pairs of
velvet breeches.
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200 THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
can thought which was caused by the agitation against
the Stamp Act. The Harvard class of 1770 was ar-
ranged in alphabetical order; and the change was
regarded as a pregnant indication that society was
tending towards republican principles.
Two Americans very soon discerned the danger
which could not fail to subsist until military rank was
closely connected with individual worth, and well-
founded social consideration. So long, (said Washing-
ton,) as the only merit that a captain possessed was his
ability to raise recruits, the privates treated him as an
equal, and, in his character of a commander, regarded
him no more than a broomstick. 1 John Adams, in
season and out of season, (if such teaching can ever be
ill-timed,) urged the doctrine that officers, whether or
not they belonged to an aristocracy of birth, should
constitute an aristocracy of talent and instruction. In
October 1776, — while the British and American armies
were at grips around New York, — he carried through
Congress a motion for the appointment of a committee
to consider a plan for the establishment of a military
academy. The project fell through, at a crisis when
every young fellow of courage was wanted in the front
as soon as he had learned how to judge distances and
deploy a company. But the author of the scheme kept
it constantly in mind ; and a quarter of a century after-
wards, as President of the United States, he enjoyed
the satisfaction of creating that celebrated college on
the river Hudson which has been surpassed by none
in the world as a nursery of great soldiers. 2
These poorly organised battalions were the component
parts of a loose-jointed and unwieldy whole. The
Commander-in-Chief found it necessary to remind all
and sundry that, when every officer exerted himself in
1 Washington to the President of Congress ; September 24, 1776.
•The Military Academy at West Point was incorporated in 1802 ;
whereas Adams ceased to be President in 1801. He was, however, the
real founder of the college. The details of its organisation, and the
selection of its first professors, were his favourite occupation during his
last year of office.
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WASHINGTON'S NEW YORK ARMY 201
his own department, an army moved like clockwork ;
but that otherwise it was an ungovernable machine,
which perplexed and distracted those who attempted to
conduct it. In July 1776, twelve quires of paper were
served out to each regiment, on which it was intended
that the colonel should write reports ; but which he too
frequently used for writing letters to his representatives
in Congress about the injustice of his not having been
made a major general. 1 Washington proclaimed it as a
melancholy truth that returns, essentially necessary for
a Commander-in-Chief to govern himself by, and which
ought to be prepared in an hour after they were called
for, were obtained with the greatest difficulty ; and that,
in regiments where the men were allowed to straggle
from quarters, instead of being called over three times
a day on the parade-ground, no account whatever of
their numbers was forthcoming. 2 A brigadier general
had, indeed, the excuse that his staff was deplorably
short-handed. Nathanael Greene now learned, with the
docility of a valiant and modest man, that a hero's
business was more complex, and vastly more tiresome,
than any conception which he had formed of it from
his reading of Plutarch. His experience was akin to
that of the adjutant in Sherman's corps, who passed his
days filling up Army forms in triplicate " in order to
stamp out the rebellion." Greene at length was reduced
*The Commander-in-Chief got his share of complaints from officers
who had been passed over for promotion. A Colonel thus addressed him
in August 1776 : " My disgrace is unalterably fixed by conferring the detur
digniori upon those of inferior standing, without the least competition of
superior merit. The variety of incidents, that may happen in an engage-
ment, will possibly demand my submission to the orders of a Brigadier
General whose standing till lately has been subordinate to mine. Diso-
bedience may lose a victory which is courting our embrace. How cruel
the alternative to be obliged to submit to my own infamy, or, by refusing,
incur the penalties of death ! " The writer then proceeds to console him-
self, and if possible to touch Washington, by quoting a saying of Sertorius,
and three most harrowing lines from Young.
a Washington to Colonel Gay ; September 4, 1776. General Lee, in
the South, experienced the same difficulty in getting punctual and accurate
reports. "I cannot send a return of our strength just now ; " he wrote ;
" for the Adjutant General, who is in love, has forgotten a whole regiment."
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202 THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
to apply for a secretary. " The science and art of war,"
(as he pathetically represented to Washington,) " require
a freedom of thought and leisure to reflect upon the
various incidents that daily occur, which cannot be had
where the whole of one's time is engrossed in clerical
employment. If your Excellency thinks I can promote
the service as much in this employment as any other, I
shall cheerfully execute the business without a murmur."
Washington'sgenerous heart foresaw in his correspondent
a competitor in fame, who under no stress of rivalry
would cease to be a loyal brother in patriotism. Within
twenty-four hours an official notice was circulated that,
General Greene being particularly engaged at present,
passes signed by Lieutenant Blodgett were to be allowed
sufficient to enable people to cross the ferries. 1 Wash-
ington himself had only three aides-de-camp ; or four,
if he counted in his secretary. John Adams remarked
that they all came from the Southward, were young
gentlemen of letters, and thought full as highly of them-
selves as they ought to think, and much more dis-
respectfully of New England and of Congress than
they ought to have thought. 2 Fine energetic fellows,
they must have brought with them from their planta-
tions a large outfit of conceit if there was any remain-
ing after they had resided six months at headquarters.
They were miserably remunerated ; and, as the only
set-off against their bad pay, they were so continuously
worked as to have no opportunity of spending a cent on
their private diversions. 8
In European campaigns of the eighteenth century it
frequently happened that the defects of an infantry,
1 Order of July 26, 1776.
J John Adams's Autobiography for October I, 1 776.
• " I give in to no kind of amusements myself ; and those about me can
have none, but arc confined from morning to evening, answering the appli-
cations and letters of one and another. If these gentlemen had the same
relaxation from duty as other officers, there would not be so much in it.
But to have the mind always on the stretch, and no hours for recreation,
makes a material odds." Washington to the President of Congress; New
York, April 22, 1776. As a consequence of this letter the pay of these
aides-de-camp was raised from thirty-three dollars a month to forty.
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WASHINGTON'S NEW YORK ARMY 203
which was not all that a general could desire, were com-
pensated by the excellence of the auxiliary arms ; but
that resource was denied to Washington. In 1780 and
afterwards, when active hostilities were in a large degree
confined to the Southern colonies, a fine cavalry formed
itself by a natural and spontaneous growth among
populations which almost lived on horseback. It was
said that a poor Virginian would walk a league to catch,
or borrow, a horse which should carry him a mile to
church. A rich planter, when once he had stepped
outside his verandah, liked to feel between his knees a
hunter which could run a four-mile heat in ten minutes,
or a " pacer," (the ancestor of the true American race-
horse,) which trotted its fourteen miles within the hour.
In the Northern colonies, however, animals were kept,
not for speed and show, but for work ; nor were their
masters such skilled equestrians as to be able speedily
to train roadsters and cart-horses into chargers. The
only cavalry in the army around New York consisted in
some regiments of Light Dragoons from Connecticut.
They traversed the city, five hundred strong, amidst the
respectful sympathy of the New England militia, and
the undisguised amusement of Southerners. Even to
Pennsylvanian eyes they appeared old-fashioned men ;
" heads of families, many of them beyond the meridian
of life " ; carrying fowling-pieces and even duck-guns,
in place of carbines and sabres ; while here and there,
in their long and disordered line of march, might be
noticed triangular laced hats and dingy scarlet regimen-
tals, redolent of glories which had gained in lustre by
the lapse of time. " Some of these worthy soldiers,"
(an admirer wrote,) " assisted in their present uniforms
at the reduction of Louisburg ; and their lank lean
cheeks, and war-worn coats, are viewed with more venera-
tion by their honest countrymen than if they were
glittering nabobs from India." 1
Washington surveyed the quaint procession something
too much in the spirit of a country gentleman who rode
1 Letter from New York of July 10, 1776.
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204 THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
to hounds. There was plenty of capability, and some
youth, in those heterogeneous ranks ; and he might well
have picked out eight or ten score of the best horses
and smartest men, and subjected them to as much dis-
cipline and practice as time permitted. Six weeks still
remained before the fighting began ; and Captain Henry
Lee, or Captain William Washington, would have got a
small body of cavalry into shape soon enough to be of
essential service. On the twenty-seventh of August,
1776, a couple of troops of yeomanry, posted and
handled by two such officers, would have saved many
hundred Americans from capture. 1 A less judicious
course was adopted. The Commander-in-Chief had
not the money to purchase the horses from their own-
ers, and declined to be at the expense of feeding them.
He proposed to dismount the brigade, and employ it
on fatigue work ; but the men statedly refused to have
anything to do with " the pick-axe, the shovel, or the
wheelbarrow." They lingered a while in camp, pas-
turing out their horses at their own cost, and reminding
each other that it would be cheaper to be carrying their
hay at home, instead of consuming other people's grass
at the rate of a dollar a fortnight ; 2 and then they re-
turned to Connecticut, having marched across the stage
at a moment so critical, in the history of a nation which
dwells so minutely on its own past, that posterity has
been told a great deal more about them than about the
hussars of Seidlitz, or the cuirassiers of Murat. One
of them found his way to Long Island, and fell into
the hands of the British, who made merry at his ex-
pense, and would not be satisfied until they had put
him through his cavalry exercise. When questioned
about the nature of his duties in the rebel army, he
replied that he could flank a little, and carry tidings.
1 There is a very just remark to this effect in an article by Mr. Charles
Francis Adams, the younger, on the Battle of Long Island.
1 Washington's despatches of July 9, 10, 1 1, and 17, 1776. On July 1 1
the Colonel wrote : "The men are principally farmers, and have left their
grass, their grain, and other affairs, much unprovided for ; and they hope
every method will be taken for their speedy relief."
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WASHINGTON'S NEW YORK ARMY 205
The language seemed uncouth to a professional ear;
but the poor trooper, according to his lights, had in
this matter shown more wisdom than his famous
general.
Washington was very ill provided in another arm,
second in importance to none on account of the peculiar
nature of the region which he had undertaken to defend.
To man the batteries of New York, to garrison the forts
along those vast estuaries which embraced the city, and
to work his field-guns in line of battle, he had but five
hundred artillerymen present for duty. 1 Howe com-
manded four times that number, perfectly equipped
and disciplined, and concentrated under his hand for
every purpose of war. 2 On the side of the Americans
in the earlier battles, round-shot and grape did little
to supplement the musket-balls; and of muskets there
was a poor show. Late in June, Washington's Adjutant
General reported that two thousand soldiers were des-
titute of arms, and nearly as many more had arms M in
such condition as rather to discourage than to animate
the user." Three weeks afterwards, at a review of New
York militia where the men were drawn up four deep,
the entire rear rank in some regiments, and a great part
of the centre ranks, had no firelocks. And again in
August, when the same State called out its last reserves
to line the river-front and guard the ferries, the Con-
vention ordered that each man, who had not arms, should
1 In August 1776 the Returns of the Army under General Washington
show 585 artillerymen. In the same month, out of 27,000 American
infantry, only 19,000 were present for duty. The effective artillerymen
cannot have exceeded the number named in the text.
a In 1777 Howe marched to Philadelphia with eight companies of the
British Royal Artillery ; and the war strength of a company was 250 men.
There was still some German artillery left ; and it must be remembered
that, in the summer and autumn of 1776, the Hessian guns and gunners,
whom Washington captured in December, were still at the disposal of the
English General. For information relating to the strength of the British
forces I am greatly indebted to the courtesy of Colonel Gerald Boyle ; the
extent of whose researches into the military statistics of the Revolutionary
war I am enabled to measure by the circumstance that he has never failed
to solve any question on which I have consulted him.
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206 THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
bring with him a shovel, a spade, a pickaxe, or a scythe
straightened and fixed upon a pole. 1
The raw levies of America were subjected to an
ordeal which has proved too severe for many a veteran
army. From the first it was impossible to adapt their
victuals exactly to their taste; and, later on in the
campaign, it often happened that no food whatever was
issued under circumstances when it was most wanted.
The husbandmen of New England, (we are told,) " used
to feed plentifully, on excellent viands, and almost
literally on milk and honey. The great harvest in
Massachusetts and New Hampshire is Indian Corn,
which they boil plain, and with milk, two or three
hours into a hasty pudding, and mix it with molasses
or with finer syrops. They mix also this Flour with
Wheat ; but the Bread, unless split and baked like ship
Biscuit, will not keep three days. These are no pro-
visions for a campaign." 2 Nevertheless the ostensible
ration, though not precisely what a farmer liked, was
all that a soldier had any right to claim ; — bacon and
mutton; butter for the sick; a daily quart of spruce
beer and cider, or molasses for those who had a sweet
tooth ; peas, beans, potatoes, vinegar, and salt, — all of
the very best, unless the contractor was prepared to
have his goods returned upon his hands; with three
pounds of candles a week to every company, as well as
four and twenty pounds of soap. It was to the honour
of New England housewives that they had educated
their sons and husbands into a keen appreciation of the
blessings of cleanliness even under the most adverse
conditions. General Greene made it a personal favour
that his troops should receive a double allowance of
the means for washing clothes when they were occupied
in digging trenches ; and a Colonel, — who had inter-
1 Colonel Reed, June 28 ; Egbert Benson to the New York Convention
in the middle of July ; and a note subjoined by Jared Sparks to the letter
of General Washington, August 12, 1776. In May a new colonel had
written to his Provincial Congress: "Gentlemen, I want amis. I have no
more than 1 10 in the regiment. For God's sake exert yourselves."
■ Letter from Paul Wentworth ; Auckland MSS.
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WASHINGTON'S NEW YORK ARMY 207
cepted a British mess-train laden with six pipes of what
he had ascertained to be Madeira, some hundred dozen
of a liquor conjectured to be Teneriffe, and a chest of
soap, — requested that his men might have some of the
wine, but earnestly begged that they might keep all the
soap. 1 Such was the comfort and abundance officially
promised to the militia ; but experience unfolded another
tale when the fat weeks around New York were suc-
ceeded by the lean months of marching and counter-
marching on the shores of North River, and along New
Jersey byways.
The Staff departments of the American army were
sparely manned, and feebly conducted. Among them
all, that of the Quartermaster General was in lowest
repute. The office had been conferred upon Colonel
Mifflin, who was brave and not corrupt ; but more of an
orator, and very much more of a party manager, than of
a military administrator. He was appointed Quarter-
master General, as a man is appointed anything and
everything at the outset of a Revolution, on account of
a reputation mainly founded on his having been the
author of^a sentence which embodied the popular faith
in few and telling words; 2 but his aptitude lay else-
where than among his professional duties, and his short
official career was a hopeless struggle against insupera-
ble difficulties. Colonel Mifflin's misfortunes, as head
of the transport, began early. When he became
Quartermaster General in October 1776, many of his
waggons, and those the best, had been left behind on
Long Island ; and nearly all that remained had fallen
'Greene to Washington, July II j Colonel Huntington to General
Heath, December 4, 1776.
8 " Let us not be bold in declarations and cold in action, nor have it
said of Philadelphia that she passed noble resolutions, and neglected
them." The words were spoken at the town meeting held in Philadelphia
on receipt of the news from Lexington. Mifflin, before the campaign was
over, rendered some brilliant and remarkable service, though not in his
own department. He soon afterwards retired from the Staff, and betook
himself to politics. After no long while he was chosen President of Con-
gress, and occupied the Chair on the fourteenth of January, 1784, when
that body ratified the final treaty of peace with England.
208 THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
into the hands of the British when they took New York.
Without waggons, (so General Lee pronounced,) it was
sometimes as impossible to march a hundred miles, al-
though the fate of a Colony depended on it, as if the
soldiers wanted legs. But there are times in warfare
when, at a vast expense of human misery, the impossible
has to be accomplished, or at least attempted. Needs
must when a victorious enemy is driving ; and the
American army retreated, and turned round to fight,
and retreated again, throughout an autumn, and half a
winter, in which the weather began by being bad, and
became atrocious. The Commissariat broke down.
Supplies of food were less than scanty. The Conti-
nental troops, according to a belief current among the
Provincial regiments, obtained more than their wretched
share of the pittance that was forthcoming; and the
swarms of militiamen, who had gathered round the
standards in July, melted away under starvation and
exhaustion, and by the end of December had almost
totally disappeared.
Such, in its weak points, was the American army :
but it had merits even more peculiar than its imperfec-
tions; and those imperfections care and time might
remedy, while its more valuable attributes were of a
kind which no mere military training could create. In
many of the infantry regiments two companies, out of
ten, were armed with rifles; and from almost every
homestead along the Western border came a backwoods-
man carrying a weapon which was the pride of his eyes,
and a main implement of his industry. " Over every
cabin door hung a well-made rifle, correctly sighted, and
bright within from frequent wiping and oiling. Beside
it were a tomahawk and knife, a horn of good powder,
and a pouch containing bullets, patches, spare flints,
steel, tinder, and whetstones, with oil and tow for clean-
ing." All these appliances were of the very best ; be-
cause the sustenance of the family, and, (when the
Indians were out and about,) its existence and its hon-
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209
our, depended upon straight shooting. A boy of the
wilderness, at an age when in England he would have
been scaring crows, was sent to kill squirrels, under
penalty in case the number of the squirrels did not tally
with the number of bullets that he expended. So soon
as he had passed his twelfth birthday, he was recognised
as part of the garrison of the farm, and was allotted his
loophole in the stockade which encircled it. In the
more settled districts, many of which were wild enough,
the country folk spared no pains to keep up the stand-
ard of marksmanship that ruled among their grand-
fathers when their township was still a frontier district.
They exercised themselves assiduously with the rifle;
just as an English yeoman under the Tudors, jealous for
the departing glory of the long-bow, made it his duty to
practise at the butts. A shooting match formed part of
the programme in all colonial festivities, and drew more
spectators than the horse-race, the auction, the raffle, or
the dance. But every American, who boasted pioneer
descent, preferred a living target. The time had passed
when venison was everywhere a staple food, with which
the population were surfeited ; 1 but deer roamed in the
Southern forests ; and, where deer ran, wolves were
seldom absent. Wild turkeys were killed with the bul-
let, and afforded a repast of which no epicure ever
wearied ; and an incautious sportsman might at any
moment find himself in startling proximity to a wild-
cat. 2 There were New Englanders, who, (as if they
could not fail, even in their pastimes, to outrage the
aristocratic sentiment of the old country,) had shot as
many as ten foxes of an evening. In the most civilised
provinces water-birds, from geese to teal, were in enor-
mous abundance; wood-pigeons, when the season for their
1 There was a time when one planter's household in Maryland was said
to have harl eighty deer in ninety days. The inmates at length preferred
dry hrcad to venison.
3 A British officer, a prisoner in the interior of the country, was in real
danger from one of these animals. A colonist, who was fortunately at
hand with his rifle, put a hullct through its brain. Travels through the
Interior Parts of America; Letter LX1X.
IT. II.— vol. I. P
2IO
THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
slaughter came, might be bought in the Boston market
for a few pence the hundred ; and a rustic, although his
£un was nothing more than a fowling-piece, had at all
events learned the habit of shooting with intent to kill.
That habit did something to supply the want of a pro-
fessional training in the American artillerymen. When
a British fleet bombarded the Charleston forts on the
twenty-eighth of June, Carolinian officers, laying down
their pipes to point the guns, waited patiently for the
smoke to clear away that they might aim with more pre-
cision. Seldom, in so fierce an engagement, was so lit-
tle powder consumed by the victors, or so much tobacco.
When the fire opened, the colonists had less than thirty
rounds for each cannon ; and only seven hundred
pounds of powder were sent into the batteries during
the conflict. And yet the British flagship was hulled
no less than seventy times ; the squadron lost over two
hundred killed and wounded ; and the two largest men-
of-war were reduced to little better than a couple of
wrecks. General Charles Lee, who commanded the de-
fence, had issued orders that, if it came to a fight on
land, no field-pieces should be discharged at a distance
over four hundred, and no rifles over a hundred and
fifty, yards. He addressed willing ears. A colonist, in
the first years of the war, was often prone to run away
if he was very much afraid of being killed himself ; but,
when he stood his ground, it was with an express pur-
pose of killing some of his opponents. The deadly,
personal, character of American sharpshooting was for
the British an unexpected and disconcerting phenome-
non, and would have altogether daunted less brave
troops than those against whom it was directed. " This
war," said an English officer, " is very different to the
last in Germany. In this the life of an individual is
sought with as much avidity as the obtaining a victory
over an army of thousands." 1
Nothing like it had ever been witnessed on the other
side of the Atlantic. Marshal Saxe, — whose exploits,
1 Travels through the Interior Parts of America ; Letter XXXI.
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211
experience, and natural ability gave him high rank as
an authority, — stated that he had more than once seen
a regiment in action fire a volley without killing four
men. 1 The musketry instruction vouchsafed to a Euro-
pean fusilier was most elementary. He was taught to
point his weapon horizontally, brace himself for its
vicious recoil, and pull a ten-pound trigger till his gun
went off ; if, indeed, it did go off when the hammer fell.
French powder was bad; and the flints used in the
English army were execrable. A most indifferent char-
acter is given them by one of our colonels, who had
fought in America and the West Indies. On the day
of a grand review, (he said,) a captain, who had the
credit of his company at heart, would buy them flints
at his own expense. The pebbles supplied by Govern-
ment were good for five or six shots, but after that they
could not be trusted ; and the springs of the lock were
too stiff and strong for convenient handling. 2 Under
those circumstances it was no wonder that even a cool
and courageous soldier let off his piece at the mass of
uniforms opposite him without distinguishing between
the individuals.
The slaughter in the commissioned ranks at Bunker's
Hill, as is sure to be the case with an unpleasant nov-
elty, excited moral disapprobation in English circles.
" How far," one gentleman wrote, " the Bostonians can
justify taking aim at officers with rifled muskets, I am
1 Article VI., page 21, of Reveries or Memoirs on the Art of War, by
Field Marshal Count Saxc ; English Translation, London, 1757. When
serving under Prince Eugene, at the battle of Belgrade, the Marshal saw
two battalions give a fire upon a large body of Turks at thirty paces ; in-
stantaneously after which the Turks rushed through the smoke, and with
their sabres cut the whole to pieces upon the spot. " I had curiosity
enough," he wrote, " to count the number of Turks which might be de-
stroyed by the general discharge of two battalions, and found it amounted
only to thirty-two." The Marshal, in his observations, discriminated be-
tween the many nations whom he had led, or met, in battle. A British
volley at near hand, as no one knew better than the victor of Fontenoy,
was sometimes a deadly performance.
2 Vol. II., page 47, of a Military Miscellany \ by the Honourable CoUn
Lindsay, Lieutenant Colonel of the Forty-sixth Regiment.
p 2
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212 THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
not military jurisprudent enough to determine. It
seems to be contrary to justice." 1 There was no ques-
tion of justice, but of physical and mental custom
which had become an ingrained instinct. Many a col-
onist had never in his life fired off a charge of powder
without singling out something or somebody, whether
it was the chief with the largest bunch of feathers in
a rush of Indian warriors, or the drake in a string of
wild-fowl. In the later stages of the war, proficiency
with their weapon was still retained by troops whom
Washington had by that time brought under the influ-
ence of the best traditions of British discipline. The
old military precept, by enforcing which General Wolfe
gained the battle of Quebec, — that the line should
reserve its fire until the enemy was within forty paces,
— produced a terrible effect when, as was the case with
the American army, at least one private out of every
three in that line had been a marksman from his boy-
hood upwards. 3
American soldiers possessed another most valuable
qualification for war which, from that day to this, they
have never lost. The multifarious labours of the farm
in a thinly peopled country had taught them to con-
struct intrenchments quickly, out of the materials that
lay closest to hand. On the evening after the engage-
ment at White Plains, Washington's officers exultingly
declared that their men were the most expert in the
world in making breastworks. In an hour or two they
had built an amazingly long stone fence, and covered
it properly with earth. On the same day, in another
1 Historical Manuscripts Commission: Fourteenth Report, Appendix,
Part IX. MSS. of James Round, Esq., M.P., of Birch Hall, Essex.
2 In the eighteenth century the ideal of every good colonel, who gave
the word of command in English, was that his battalion should deliver
" one close well-directed fire at the distance of eight or ten rods." Amer-
ican Archives ; October 27, 1776.
While writing the last four paragraphs I have been especially indebted
to two articles in American periodicals; — "Social Life in the Colonies,"
by Edward Eggleston.in the Century Magazine for July 1885; and " The
Birth of the American Army," by Horace Kephart, in Harper's Magazine
for May 1899.
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213
part of the same position, lay a field of Indian
corn which the soldiers pulled up by armfuls. The
roots of the stalks, with the great lumps of soil adhering
to each bundle, were arranged "in the face of the works,
and answered the purpose of sods or fascines. The tops
having been placed inwards, as the loose earth was
thrown upon them, became as so many ties to the work,
which was carried up with despatch scarcely conceiv-
able." When more time was at the disposal of the
Americans, and when the neighbourhood happened to
be well wooded, their field-works attained a perfection
of solidity. The fortifications on Long Island consisted
of timbers a yard thick, laid side by side to a breadth of
ten or twelve feet, and a height of twenty ; and a hedge
within gun-shot of the rampart was deftly converted
into an abattis which ought to have been sufficient to
delay the assailants while a half dozen rounds were
being fired by the defenders. Wherever, as in the
siege-works outside Boston, there was a continuous
front which could not be turned, the rank and file of
the army might be trusted, almost without superior
direction, to render that front impregnable ; but it was
another matter when the work to be done was beyond
the scope of spadesmen, wood-cutters, and mechanics.
The American had not yet been discovered who was
equal to the task of locating, and laying out, an isolated
and self-contained fortress which might confidently be
esteemed defensible. In November 1775 Washington
had informed his Government that the camp could not
furnish one good engineer ; and he was no better pro-
vided in May 1776, when necessity called upon him to
occupy the shores of New York Island, and the domi-
nant neadlands along the Hudson River, with strong-
holds upon the maintenance of which the very existence
of the Republic, to all appearance, depended. His
Chief Engineer was Colonel Rufus Putnam, nephew to
the Major General. Fashionable and fastidious officers
objected to him because he had been seen carrying his
own ration of meat to his quarters. When speaking
214 THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
about the gorge of a redoubt, Colonel Putnam was ru-
moured to have pronounced the word as if it were the
name of the King with a view to whose discomfiture that
redoubt was in course of erection ; which, indeed, would
have mattered little if only the work had been so planned
as to keep the monarch's soldiers outside its walls. But
the science of Vauban, even more than others, demands
the acquisition of exact knowledge as an indispensable
preliminary to the inspirations of natural genius. Put-
nam's citadels were death-traps for their garrisons;
and not Putnam's only. General Arnold wrote from
St John's that his Engineer was a perfect sot; and
indeed he appears to have taken so little account of
water as a beverage that one stockade in the Northern
district did not include a well or a spring, although the
space walled in was too large for any force that could
be spared to hold the post. " The thing called a fort,"
(such is the testimony of an eye-witness,) "baffles all
description. It is an irregular polygon; — irregular
indeed, and indefensible with a vengeance." 1
After a while Colonel Putnam resigned his position,
on the respectable plea that Congress had refused to
sanction the formation of a separate corps of sappers and
miners. He took command of an infantry regiment,
which every Major General was soon eager to have
attached to his brigade; for Putnam made his people
skilful boatmen and good workmen, and he himself, like
a true American, had been instructed, and not disheart-
ened, by his own failures as an engineer. Washington
was in no hurry to replace him either by a native ama-
teur, or by one of those numerous foreigners who, to
hear them talk, were as good as anything that had ap-
peared since Archimedes ; but whose only ascertained
qualifications were that they could not speak English,
and stood in urgent need of a salary. At length he
secured the services of four excellent French officers,
1 Washington's letters of November 2, 1775; Pennsyhanian Me-
moirs, chapter vi. ; Arnold to Sullivan, June 10,1776; and Bernard
Romans to Gates, November 1776.
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215
regularly bred to their business, who came to the United
States with the knowledge and approbation of their own
Government. Soldiers and men of science, these gen-
tlemen were neither martinets nor pedants. They knew
how to encourage the cleverness, and stimulate the exer-
tions, of an American working-party ; and in return they
freely acknowledged that better sappers and military
artificers did not exist than the farm-hands of Rhode
Island and New Hampshire, and the lumberers from the
forest-camps on the banks of the Kennebec and the
Penobscot. 1
The military successes of the colonists were in part
due to a special circumstance with reference to which
their ardent, and in other respects sympathetic, well-
wishers in Parisian philosophical circles regarded them
as sadly behind the times. Patriotism and religion ex-
isted in other countries ; but the colonies had not passed
the stage when, in many minds, these two sentiments
were inextricably mingled. Religious doctrine in America
was more reasonable and milder, and far less intellectu-
ally tyrannical, than among English Puritans and Scotch
Covenanters during the great period of their history;
but not John Lilburn, or Baillie of Kilwinning, had a
stronger and more present faith in the personal govern-
ment of the universe than that which, in the year 1776,
animated the congregations of America. Those congre-
gations never doubted that the Almighty dealt directly
with nations as with individuals; and it was a belief
which, (as in other virile and thoughtful communities,
when profoundly excited by momentous events,) took
shape in a persuasion that their own interests and for-
1 " I have to mention," (so Washington wrote from Trenton on Decem-
ber 20, 1 776,) "that for want of some establishment in the department
of engineers, agreeably to the plan laid before Congress in October last,
Colonel Putnam, who was at the head of it, has quitted, and taken a regi-
ment in the State of Massachusetts. I know of no other man tolerably
qualified for the conducting of that business. None of the French gen-
tlemen whom I have seen appear to me to know anything of the matter."
The Chevalier Duportail was appointed Chief Engineer in the latter part
of the year 1777, and retained that employment until the war had ended.
2l6 THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
tunes were, in some sort, His peculiar care. Such a
persuasion, when sincerely held, is a political, and still
more a warlike, force of remarkable potency. So far
from tempting those who entertain it to relax their efforts
because the final result of those efforts is ordained on
high, it makes them diligent in preparation, valiant in
action, and, above all things, patient and resolute in ad-
versity. Jonathan Trumbull was the Governor of Con-
necticut, than whom no more vigilant and painstaking
an administrator ever raised a regiment or levied a war-
tax ; and he thus expressed himself to the Commander-
in-Chief of the army which he was labouring night
and day to feed and to reinforce. 11 It is nothing with
God to help, whether with many, or with those that have
no power. He hath so ordered things in the administra-
tion of the affairs of the world as to encourage the use
of means, and yet so as to keep men in continual depend-
ence upon Him for the efficacy and success of them." 1
That was no waste of ink, even in an official corre-
spondence. The faith which actuated, and the spirit
which possessed, not a few among her leading men be-
came of ever increasing advantage to America when mis-
fortune darkened down upon her hopes. Those men
had seldom exulted unduly over their successes ; and
they did not murmur or quail beneath disaster, inasmuch
as, to their view, it came straight from One who never
chastised unjustly or without design. When the colo-
nists were victorious, His was the glory ; and when they
were brought within sight of destruction, it was a speak-
ing testimony from Heaven against a sinful nation. 2 That
was the creed of religious Americans, who were the leaven
of the people, whatever proportion they might bear to
the entire mass. It was held alike among the rich and
the humble ; and it was a creed especially well suited
1 Governor Trumbull to Washington; August 31, 1776.
•The American Archives contain a fine letter of September 1 776,
referring to the evacuation of New York by Washington's army.
."Trouble," said the writer, ** does not spring out of the dust, nor rise from
the ground. It is God who has blunted the weapons of our warfare, and
fashioned the counsels of our wise men to foolishness."
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217
for fighting men. There was many a soldier who hon-
estly strove to mend his ways, and make himself a better
Christian, in order that he might contribute towards
averting the Divine wrath from his cause ; who spent
his leisure, not in criticising his superior officers, but in
searching his own heart and examining his own conduct ;
and who went into battle with a quiet conviction that his
life was in God's keeping.
Such an one was Amos Farnsworth, who came of a
homely, a thriving, and, (it is almost needless to add,)
a very numerous Massachusetts family. He did not
spell his own name correctly on the title-page of his
diary ; but that diary is nevertheless a record worth the
attention of all such as care to understand the inner
springs of the American Revolution. Soon after the
young man joined the army before Boston, he anxiously
and solemnly devoted himself to God's service, and
prayed earnestly that he might be strengthened to keep
his resolution. On Sunday, the eleventh of June, he
listened to a sermon on the duty of resting all our care
on Him who cares for us : and, before the week was
out, his faith was put to the test ; for on the following
Friday, (he writes,) " Our Regiment paraded, and about
Sunset we was drawn up and heard Prayers, and about
dusk marched for Bunker's Hill, under command of our
own Colonel Prescott" Next day Farnsworth did not
leave the redoubt until it was filling fast with British in-
fantry ; and, before he had retreated fifty yards, he was
struck by two bullets, one of which shattered his right
arm. They sent him back to the care of his " honoured
father " ; and after eight weeks of suffering, on the first
day that he could make shift to form the letters of an
entry in his journal, he rejoined the regiment in such a
condition that the surgeons insisted on his undergoing
a severe and painful operation.
He belonged to a class of men who entered on the
war gravely and ruefully, but who meant to see it through.
Their path had been made very plain before them by
the Declaration of Independence. That event, (to use
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2l8 THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
their own words,) had called them out of darkness into a
marvellous light ; for they were as those who in time
past were not a People, but who now were determined
so to bear themselves, under their passing trials and
perils, that a People for all future time they should
remain. Of such material was composed that handful
of Washington's followers, the last remnant of a great
host, who, when they found themselves, — starving
indeed and exhausted, but safe, and for the moment
unassailable, — behind the broad and rapid Delaware,
deliberately re-crossed the river, and went once more
into the lion's mouth. Sandwich and Rigby called these
poor people cowards : and undoubtedly they feared God,
a weakness from which the Bedfords were exempt. But
they were not afraid of the midnight torrent, swirling
with ice-blocks; and, when they reached the further
shore, they were not afraid of the Hessians. Hating
war, — shocked by the coarseness, the vice, and the self-
seeking from which camps are never free, — they contin-
ued under arms until peace was secured ; and then they
went home, purposing thenceforth to do their share as
citizens towards making the country, which they had
saved, worthy of the signal favours accorded to it by
Providence. 1
1 Some extracts from Amos Farnsworth's Diary for 1 775-6 are given in
the Second Appendix, at the end of this volume.
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CHAPTER VII
CROWN POINT. GENERAL HOWE ON STATEN ISLAND.
AN INTERLUDE IN WAR
During all summer and autumn, in that year of 1776,
the gaze of the American continent was, from time to
time, directed with anxiety towards the quarter whence
Sir Guy Carleton and his army were expected. The
command of the Northern department had been en-
trusted to General Philip Schuyler; a leading person-
age among a group of Dutch families, endowed with
vast landed possessions in the province of New York,
and closely connected among each other by the ties of
marriage. Schuyler's wife was a Van Rensselaer, whose
ancestor had been the Patroon, (or, in more familiar
terms, the Hereditary Superior,) of a manor extending
over six hundred square miles ; within the boundaries of
which he nominated the administrative and judicial offi-
cers, held a Court Leet and a Court Baron, received a
tenth part of the revenues, and was responsible for con-
ducting civil government and for maintaining order. 1
Before 1775 that immense district, which constituted
the Van Rensselaer property, had been divided among
the heirs, male and female ; but the value of each share
1 Mr. Floyd de Lancey, in a careful essay, has drawn a distinction be-
tween the Freehold Manors of America and the Feudal Manors of mediae-
val Europe ; but the resemblance between the two systems was stronger
than modern opinion would tolerate. In 1830 the New York Legislature
put an end to what was exceptional in the territorial institutions of the
State, and declared in so many words that " all feudal tenures of every
description, with all their incidents, are abolished." Mr. de Lancey's
paper was a contribution to the valuable, and very bulky, work, entitled
History of Westrhester County ; edited, and largely written, by J. Thomas
Scharf, A.M., LL.D.
219
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220 THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
had grown rapidly, and the proceeds of the several es-
tates had become enormous, in kind, if not in money.
The sons were very great people, and the husbands of
the daughters also. Schuyler, who himself had suc-
ceeded to several large fortunes, had a noble town-house
in the suburbs of the provincial capital, and a country
seat beneath whose roof he fondly hoped that his declin-
ing years would be passed. But the future of that
mansion was less secure than the owner had anticipated ;
although it was situated in a peaceful valley on the head
waters of the Hudson, in the pleasant hamlet of Sara-
toga. 1
Schuyler, as a youth, had behaved with courage in the
French war. He had a great name among the Indians,
whom he knew how to regale and to amuse, and whose
self-respect he flattered by treating with their chief men
on equal terms when they approached him in the char-
acter of negotiators. During the Revolutionary war his
popularity with the tribes did much to counteract the
influence of the Johnsons, — the famous Tory and Loy-
alist house of Try on County on the Mohawk river.
Schuyler sate, whenever he chose, in the Provincial
Assembly, where he was resolute against the Stamp
Act; and in June 1776 Congress appointed him one of
the first four Major Generals. None of the four dis-
played high merit ; and the great New York land-owner
had his points of superiority over each of the other
three. A man of honour and ability, he showed himself
more unselfish and trustworthy than General Charles
Lee ; and he was much younger than General Putnam,
and very much younger than General Ward. But the
profuse and continuous hospitality which he dispensed
in town and country had told a tale upon his constitu-
tion. 2 In the previous autumn he had accompanied the
1 The Life of Cathtritu Schuyler, by Mary Gay Humphreys, throws
much light on the character and motives of General Schuyler; although
that attractive volume does not professedly bear upon the disagreeable
historical controversies which have clustered around his reputation.
* At the funeral of Mrs. Cornelia Van Cortlandt, the General's mother,
140 gallons of wine and two barrels of ale were consumed by the mourners.
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CROWN POINT
221
expedition to Canada in person, as far as St. John's on
the Sorel river, until gout and rheumatism brought him
back from the front. He returned to the camp from
time to time, when his health permitted ; but he never
was successful in the field. He remained for the most
part in Albany, providing and forwarding men and
military stores, and loyally guiding the main operations
of the Northern war in a direction conformable to the
general plans of Washington.
When Schuyler was at the base of operations, the
charge of the active army devolved upon General
Horatio Gates. Of him it is sufficient to say that, al-
though his name is linked with the most celebrated
American triumph of the Revolutionary war, the his-
torians of a patriotic and, (where signal public services
are in question,) a lavishly grateful nation, say much to
his discredit, and very little indeed in his praise. 1 The
future conqueror of Saratoga, except in his appetite for
fame and preferment, was a very ordinary man ; and,
when he took over Sullivan's beaten army, he had to
deal with extraordinary difficulties. Crown Point, in
June and July 1776, was not a camp, but a lazar-house.
A visitor from Connecticut related that he never looked
into a bed or a hut in which he did not find a dead or
dying man. " Everything about this army," (so Gates
A visitor from Maryland acknowledged the Schuyler Madeira to be
sounder than any that was drunk in his own colony; and a French Mar-
quis, who had no provincial jealousy to qualify his relish of it, was still
more emphatic in his commendation. But gout comes from other causes
than strong liquor, as our own sober generation sadly recognises. Mrs.
Grant of Laggan relates how the tea-table at Madam Schuyler's was cov-
ered with "all sorts of cake unknown to us; cold pastry; and great quan-
tities of sweetmeats and preserved fruits of all kinds. In all manner of
which cost them nothing, and getting sugar home at an easy rate in return
for their exports to the West Indies, the quantities of these articles used in
families, otherwise plain and frugal, was astonishing."
1 Senator Henry Cabot Lodge speaks of Gates as slow and ineffective
in battle, but sufficiently active in looking after his own advancement;
Bancroft calls him shallow, vain, and timorous, and of small administrative
ability; and Mr. John Fiske shortly describes his career as one of intrigue
and imbecility.
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222 THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
truly reported,) "is infected by the pestilence; the
clothes, the blankets, the air, the ground they walk
upon." During an early stage of the retreat from
Canada, Sullivan had written to Washington in ominous
terms. "The raging of the small-pox," he said, "de-
prives us of whole regiments in the course of a few days.
Of the remaining regiments from fifty to sixty in each
are taken down in a day, and we have nothing to give
them but salt pork, flour, and the poisonous waters of
this lake." 1 Sullivan enclosed a return of soldiers, ab-
sent from duty, which wa*s only forty-eight hours old ;
with the remark that, in the short time which had
elapsed since the enumeration was made out, a quarter
part of those given as effectives had been prostrated by
the camp disorder. Of Colonel Paterson's battalion, (he
observed,) there was no return at all. That officer had
but five men fit for duty ; and those had been ordered
southwards to join the rest of their comrades who were
all sick at Crown Point. Sullivan, as is known from
other sources, did not unduly darken the colour of that
gloomy story. Colonel Paterson had marched out of
New York, on the twenty-first of April, at the head of
six hundred healthy well-appointed troops. In Decem-
ber, Schuyler sent him back to the assistance of Wash-
ington, in Washington's utmost need ; and, when he
arrived among the bivouacs of the Southern army, he
had only two hundred rank and file present with the
colours. 2
That was the state of things under Sullivan in June.
In July Gates represented to Washington that it would
be to the last degree improper to order reinforcements
1 Sullivan's allusion to the poisonous character of the lake is explained
in a narrative left by one of his Generals, who speaks of a white scum
on the face of the water in the morning, which was driven by the ripples
against the shore, and which, in the middle of the day, had become putre-
fied by the sun, and very offensive to the smell. Memoirs of Brigadier
John Lacey, published by the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, in July
1901.
a Note to Washington's letter of July 19, 1776, in the Edition of Mr.
Jared Sparks. American Archives for June and July 1776. The Lift of
Major General John Paterson, by Thomas Egleston.
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CROWN POINT
223
to Crown Point or Ticonderoga, until obliged by the
most pressing emergency, as it would only be heaping
one hospital upon another; — if indeed hospitals those
could be named which contained no accommodation for
invalids, and no medicines whatsoever. " No emetic or
cathartic, no mercurial or antimonial remedy. It would
melt a heart of stone to hear the moans and distresses
of the sick and dying." So the doctors averred; but
they did not fold their hands in despair ; and, since they
could not physic the sick, they tried at any rate to keep
the well fit for duty. They served out to the soldiers
rum, infused with four pounds of gentian root, and two
pounds of orange peel, to a hogshead ; and, where these
ingredients might not be procured, the Regimental Sur-
geons were directed to use as a substitute snakeroot,
dogwood, and centaury. In either case the men were
none the worse for the flavouring matter, and presum-
ably somewhat the happier for the rum. Though their
medicine chests were empty, American physicians, al-
ready in the van of their profession, did not love to be
idle : and their industry took a shape which, in the view
of a commanding officer whose object was to keep his
ranks full, was more than questionable. Inoculation for
the small-pox, rendered fashionable in Europe sixty
years before by the example and teaching of Lady
Mary Wortley Montagu, had become an article of medi-
cal faith, and a very popular social institution, in the
colonies. The clergy preached against it as rash inter-
ference with the designs of Providence; but it com-
mended itself to parents, to family physicians, and, what
was more to the purpose still, (since America in that
respect was already America,) to the young people
themselves. They selected a spacious and pleasant
house with an enclosed garden, made up a cheerful
party, and were all inoculated together. They reckoned
upon only two or three days in bed with the illness;
and then, during six weeks of quarantine and conva-
lescence, they gossiped, and lounged, and made each
other merry, and drank tea at all hours, — little thinking
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224 THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
that the time was close at hand when, except by stealth,
they would not venture to drink it at all. The custom,
it was confessed, "could not be regarded as an unmixed
blessing ; for the patients were sometimes very ill, and
a few died. Still, when successful, it gave complete
immunity, and saved innumerable lives."
There is a time for all things ; and the time to choose
for inoculating an army is not the moment when the
hostile columns are breaking through its line of out-
posts ; but no mere military considerations were power-
ful enough to deter the American doctors from obeying
the voice of their professional conscience. They fell
to work, at first without orders from the general, and
afterwards in direct defiance of his prohibitions. There
might be no drugs wherewith to treat the small-pox ;
but the vehicle for communicating it from one individual
to another was only too readily procurable. The medi-
cal staff answered all objectors by the doctrine that the
disease "was very mortal to those who took it in the
natural way." But, in the first place, the poor fellows
who were the subjects of their attentions were already
half dead with exhaustion and starvation, and had not
the vitality to endure even the beneficent workings of
an artificial malady ; and the soldiers who had not been
inoculated caught the infection, by hundreds a day,
from those who had undergone the operation. On May
the twenty-seventh the army, which then was still com-
manded by General Thomas, was described as broken
and disheartened, half of it being under inoculation and
other diseases. Thomas already had small-pox upon
him, " having taken it in the natural way." But he
passed his days in the saddle, and his evenings at the
writing-table, until the second of June arrived ; and then
he died, and his country has not forgotten him.
With that melancholy and conspicuous example to
point their warnings, the men of science carried with
them the opinion of the army, in every rank below the
highest. Where a surgeon hesitated to disregard those
express orders, which were repeatedly issued from head-
CROWN POINT
225
quarters, the soldiers made shift to inoculate themselves
and each other. Precaution was in some cases a mere
excuse for poltroonery. Certain officers of the force
which had been ordered north under Sullivan, on the
pretext that they were going where small-pox was preva-
lent, withdrew themselves from their duties; paid a
complaisant practitioner to do them the required service,
and write them out the necessary certificate ; and then
passed their time among the pleasures of the city. In
one single corps a lieutenant colonel, a captain, and a
doctor organised an inoculation frolic of their own, and
were not to be found when the battalion started. Three
other field-officers left their regiments on the march, and
went back in search of an apothecary whose poverty, or
whose Toryism, would consent to their wishes. Even
at this distance of time it is satisfactory to relate that
the whole party were tracked to their haunt in New
York, placed under arrest, and sent north to be court-
martialled. The patience of commanding officers was
in the end exhausted. "A villain of a surgeon," Gen-
eral Gates wrote in August, "is inoculating the militia
as fast as they arrive. Such a slave to private gain,
who would sacrifice this army for the sake of a few
dollars to himself, deserves condign punishment. As
fine an army as ever marched into Canada has this year
been entirely ruined by the small-pox." At last it came
to an indignant colonel denouncing his regimental doctor
as a damned puppy of a quack who had carried on the
abominable practice to the utter destruction of his bat-
talion. 1
Such words, and worse yet, were beginning to be
frequently uttered throughout all the cantonments
which lay between Lake George and Lake Champlain.
1 The passion for inoculation in the New England regiments was
intensified by recollections of the great epidemic of 1764. A very inter-
esting letter from Mr. James Gordon, written in the spring of that year,
has been published by the Massachusetts Historical Society. Whether or
not it accurately records the facts and statistics, it faithfully represents the
belief prevailing in the colony with regard to them. We are told that, of
the first twelve people seized' with small-pox, ten perished ; that the Pro-
PT. 11.— vol. 1. Q
226 THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
Dreadful reports of the strange oaths which were fash-
ionable in those regions brought sorrow and consterna-
tion into many a New England household. Young
militiamen received from their parents earnest remon-
strances against "the most foolish and unaccountable
of vices," and solemn reminders that the business of
religion ought to be the daily concern in the life of a
soldier. 1 The Reverend William Gordon, the chroni-
cler of the war, who did not bestow the inestimable
honour of his presence lightly, or without conditions,
promised Gates a visit as soon as he could be assured
that there was a marked improvement in the language
employed at Ticonderoga. " Let not," he said, " any
future historian have to remark that the best troops in
the world were most given to cursing and swearing."
He described himself as plotting to set ofT in September
for both camps, and as expecting a cordial reception
from General Gates and General Washington. If the
good man's presence at the head-quarters of either com-
mander depended upon all the adjectives used in their
immediate neighbourhood being fit for the ears of a
clergyman, it was likely to be long deferred. ' Wash-
ington, on the third of August, addressed to the troops
round New York a general order regretting that pro-
fane cursing and swearing, which theretofore had been
little known in an American army, was growing into
fashion ; and warning them that it was idle to hope for
a blessing on their arms from Heaven if they insulted
it by such impiety and folly, and, (so that true Virginian
gentleman did not shrink from declaring,) by such de-
testable and despicable vulgarity. 2
vincial Assembly adjourned to Cambridge ; that a special Act was passed
to enable the Courts of Law to sit elsewhere than in Boston ; and that
everyone who could afford to travel left the city. At length hospitals
were opened, and three thousand persons inoculated, of whom only three
or four died ; and by that policy the plague was stayed.
1 Letter from Governor Trumbull to his son in the Northern army;
September 1776.
2 There was one military station where Mr. Gordon might have escaped
being scandalised ; that is to say, if he had got there before the British
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CROWN POINT
227
If the Northern army swore terribly, it was with as
much excuse as ever army had, whether in Flanders
or anywhere else. The American soldiers in Canada
suffered on the one hand from the miserable poverty of
a recently organised and a struggling government ; and,
on the other, from administrative defects and corrup-
tions which had survived from the days of the old sys-
tem. " Every kind of abuse," (wrote Sullivan in May
1776,) "is practised that men long versed in villainy
could devise. I found at Stillwater a number of barrels
of pork that the waggoners had tapped, and drawn off
the pickle to lighten their teams. This pork must inev-
itably be ruined before it can reach Canada. The wag-
goners learned this piece of skill in the last war." The
supplies of clothing, provisions, and warlike stores had
been exhausted; and consignments of those articles,
which at long intervals reached their destination, were
mostly of the wrong sort. When General Thomas, with
death close upon him, was trying to rally his defeated
regiments, and induce them once more to face the en-
emy, a ton of lead, fifty quires of paper, and fifteen
pounds of thread were still required to bring the ammuni-
tion for small-arms up to four and twenty rounds a man.
Later in the campaign some hogsheads of paper
arrived ; but the material was too thick for musket
cartridges, and too thin for cannon. Congress had
nominated Dr. Franklin, and two others from among
its prominent members, to inspect the condition, and
regulate the operations, of the Canada army. As the
artillery department of that army had not credit to
hire a cart, the Commissioners brought on three barrels
of powder in their chaise ; and at one village on their
route they purchased thirty loaves from a baker's shop
took it, as take it they did, from its blameless garrison. " Business goes
on slow at Montgomery since you left it Nothing has been done except
to the small battery on the South side of the hill. If Colonel Humphry
can git his officers together to sing Salms, and tell people how well he can
govern men without Swearing at them, he is content." Peter Tappin to
General Clinton ; August 19, 1776.
Q2
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228 THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
to feed a company of famished infantry. " We cannot,"
(so these gentlemen reported to Congress,) " find words
to describe our miserable situation ; — soldiers without
discipline, and reduced to live from hand to mouth, de-
pending on the scanty and precarious supplies of a few
half-starved cattle, and trifling quantities of flour, which
have hitherto been picked up in different parts of the
country. Your military chest contains eleven hundred
paper dollars. You are indebted to your troops treble
that sum, and to the inhabitants above eighteen hundred
dollars." That was plain speaking, and it produced
some effect; for Congress transmitted for the use of
the Northern army sixteen hundred pounds in specie,
together with copies of " a spirited Resolution in favour
of national independence." But fine words, — and
very fine words it must be admitted that they were, —
are a poor substitute for bread, and fresh meat, and
broad-cloth, and shoe-leather. After the Republic
was established, its soldiers were fed, clad, and shod
no better than when their legal status was still that
of unauthorised rebels against the British Crown.
So late as October 1776, a Patriot on his travels
wrote as follows from Saratoga: "The regiment is
now within a few miles of this place, marching with
cheerfulness, but a great part of the men bare-
footed and bare-legged. There is not a single shoe
or stocking to be had in this part of the world, or I
would ride a hundred miles through the woods to
purchase them with my own money. I shall empty
my portmanteau of the stockings I have for my own
use on this journey; but this is a drop of water in the
ocean."
Under these distressing circumstances it is not matter
of wonder that the General responsible for the safety of
the Northern department should have taken measures
to refresh and re-fashion his battered army at a point as
far as possible removed from hostile observation and
interruption. The retirement to Crown Point had been
viewed by Washington with doubt, and even with dis-
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CROWN POINT
229
approbation. 1 In May he had urged Thomas to main-
tain a stand on the lower reaches of the Sorel river,
inasmuch as the tract of country within his lines would
remain faithful and useful to the American cause;
whereas all the districts which might be abandoned
would fall, perhaps not unwillingly, into the power of
Carleton. These gloomy anticipations were fulfilled ;
and there was worse in prospect. For a hundred and
fifty miles south from the sources of the Connecticut
river, throughout the whole of New Hampshire and of
what is now Vermont, the farming population slept at
night with their most valuable furniture packed ready
for an instant move. They had lent their stores of
ammunition for the use of the Continental army ; and
Congress was besieged by expresses begging and pray-
ing for powder, without which the whole of that fertile
region would have to be evacuated, and the very town-
ships of Massachusetts would, as a consequence, be laid
open to the ravages of Indians and French Canadians
in the Royal pay. 2
The withdrawal of the army to the south end of Lake
Champlain was a grave calamity for the Republican
Government; and, in July, Gates announced that he
must make a further move backward to the north end
of Lake George, and place his head-quarters in security
behind the fortifications of Ticonderoga. This resolu-
tion was not carried into effect until it had been unani-
mously sanctioned by a council of generals, amongst
whom was Benedict Arnold; and there is, to say the
least, a strong presumption that no military step, to
which Arnold gave his assent, can have erred in the
direction of pusillanimity, or even of excessive caution.
The decision, however, found plenty of critics. A re-
monstrance was drawn up in the Northern camp, and
signed by over twenty Colonels and Majors. Washing-
1 The operations detailed in this chapter may be followed on the map
at the end of the volume.
■ Letter from Exeter in New Hampshire, of June 29, to James Warren,
President of the Massachusetts Congress.
230 THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
ton, in terms which for him were blunt, assured Gates
that nothing short of a dislike to encourage inferior
officers in the practice of animadverting upon the action
of their superiors, and a belief that the works at Crown
Point had already been demolished, prevented him from
insisting upon the re-occupation of that post. His own
council of generals, (he said,) had advised him to over-
ride what they regarded as a disastrous and altogether
unnecessary measure. Gates combated the arguments
of the Commander-in-Chief with powerful reasons, put
forward earnestly, but most respectfully. 1 None the
less he keenly resented the interference of the New
York generals, who did not confine themselves to giving
their advice when called upon by Washington, but en-
forced it in unceremonious private letters addressed to
their colleagues at Ticondcroga. Putnam, in particular,
wrote his mind very plainly, and was answered by Gates
with a spice of fraternal raillery which suggests a lively
impression of the relations existing between the citizen-
soldiers of the early Revolution. 2
For the next fifteen months Benedict Arnold was a
shining figure in the stormy foreground of the war.
When the rest of Canada was abandoned by the Ameri-
cans, he had held on to Montreal until the place was
threatened by an overpowering English force. " Then
he made a masterly retreat to St. John's. After seeing
all the men embark, and the last boat leave the shore,
he, with a single attendant, mounted his horse and rode
back to reconnoitre the British. Coming in sight of the
1 Washington to Gates; July 19, 1776. Gates to Washington; July 29.
* " Dear Put, Every fond mother dotes on her booby, be his imperfec-
tions ever so glaring. Crown Point was not indeed your own immediate
offspring; but you had a hand in rearing the baby. You cut all the logs
which are now as rotten as dirt. Why should you not be fond of Crown
Point? If I live to be as old as you, I shall be as fond of Ticondcroga.
What have you done, and what you not done? Have you blown up
Stat en Island? Have you burned the enemy's fleet? Have you sent the
two brothers Howe to Hartford Jail? I shall preserve your letter for a
winter's evening's subject, when we meet again. Remember me affection-
ately, as you ought; and believe me, veteran, your sincere well-wisher,
Horatio Gates." Crown Point, August 3, 1776.
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CROWN POINT
231
advancing columns he satisfied himself of their numbers
and character. He wheeled his horse just in time to
escape, and galloping back to the shore of the lake, and
stripping his horse of saddle and bridle, the animal was
shot to prevent his falling into the hands of the enemy.
With his own hands he pushed his boat from the shore,
and, leaping into it, he was the last man to leave
Canada." 1 Arnold had displayed marked ability and
valour during the whole period that Sullivan was ma-
noeuvring on the St. Lawrence ; but it had not been
within his power to avert defeat. His commanding
faculties were deprived of free play so long as he was
under the orders of a self-sufficing, and rather preten-
tious, general ; and his rare military perception informed
him that the attempt on Canada had failed, and that the
forward position of the army was untenable. In June
1776, (to use the words of John Adams,) Arnold was
wholly in the dismals. 2 But when the retreat had at-
tained its utmost limit, and the Americans turned to
bay, the brilliant officer was himself again, and fixed the
attention of both the contending nations upon his auda-
cious, resourceful, and masterful personality. He had a
fever on him ; and his wound, to which he had never
given the chance of being healed, was very painful.
Arnold did not consider his own health ; and, where he
suspected shirking, he required very strong proof of illness
in others. He checked the practice of surreptitious
inoculation by putting the sick on half-rations — a device
which was quite in Franklin's style; but he spared no
pains, nor was he scrupulous about the methods which he
employed, in order to provide abundant, and even ap-
petising, food for the soldiers who were doing their duty. 3
1 The Life of Benedict Arnold, by Isaac N. Arnold. The impartiality
of this book is indicated by the motto on the title-page : 44 He will give
the Devil his due."
2 John Adams to Samuel Chase; Philadelphia, June 24, 1776.
' Complaint was made, in a letter to Arnold, that his people had dug up
two fields of young potatoes, and had swept bare an acre of peas, and five or
six acres of com. The case was all the harder because the injured party h.ul
recently sent to Arnold's quarters a present of nearly fourscore salmon.
232 THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
Gates, who had some self-knowledge, allowed full
scope to his formidable subordinate. Whatever depart-
ment Arnold took in hand was at once made alive by
his energy and inventiveness. An opportunity now be-
fell him for utilising the experience which he had
acquired on the high seas as a merchant captain. " Our
little fleet," Gates wrote from Ticonderoga, " is equip-
ping under the direction of General Arnold, with all the
industry which his activity and good example can inspire.
As fast as they are fitted they are sent to Crown Point.
Three hundred men and officers have been drafted from
the corps here to man the vessels ; one half seamen, the
other to act as marines. As soon as all the vessels and
gondolas are equipped, General Arnold has offered to
go to Crown Point, and take the command of them.
This is exceedingly pleasing to me ; as he has a perfect
knowledge of maritime affairs, and is, besides, a most
deserving and gallant officer." These naval prepara-
tions, (the General went on to state,) were of the last
importance ; for should the enemy establish a superior-
ity over the American flotilla on Lake Champlain, the
great water-way was theirs, let who would possess
Crown Point 1
That superiority was already a fact, undeniable, and
in all likelihood irremediable ; and so Arnold well knew,
for he was admirably served by those on whom he de-
pended for information. The country in possession of
the Royal army swarmed with his spies, carrying their
credentials between the soles of their shoes, together
with a promise to pay each of them two hundred and
fifty dollars if he returned alive. The American com-
mander was perfectly aware that he had on board his
fleet only one gun for every two of Carleton's ; and that,
compared with the larger British vessels, his own were
toy-boats. But the object at which he aimed was to
present such a threatening appearance as would impose
upon his adversary, and delay the English advance until
the season for concerted action between Howe and
1 Gates to Washington; July 29, 1776.
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CROWN POINT
Carleton, for that year at all events, was past and gone.
And at the bottom of his heart, like other men of his
stamp, he cherished a secret hope that by desperate and
aggressive action, — by putting in his last ship, and
risking the lives of all his crews, — he might violate
fortune ; and might snatch a victory which in his cooler
moments, if he ever had them, he himself would recog-
nise as beyond the remotest bounds of possibility.
Arnold attacked his task in a spirit of joyous confi-
dence, which any show of opposition in any quarter at
once converted into overbearing insolence. His letters,
during the summer of 1776, read like the correspond-
ence of a generalissimo. He was surprised, (he de-
clared,) at the strange infatuation and economy of
Congress, whose parsimony and negligence would ruin
all at last. His written requisitions for men and mate-
rials were flying about through all the continent, ad-
dressed sometimes to public authorities, and sometimes
to private employers and capitalists, but always couched
in a strain which did not brook refusal. On the first of
July a contract was signed securing to him shipwrights
at the rate of thirty-five dollars a month, a ration and a
half of victuals, and one half-pint of rum a day ; and he
spared no trouble or expense to engage leading workmen
who might act, (for that phrase was already current,) as
" bosses." A fortnight later Arnold asked for five hun-
dred blocks, and seventy anchors and hawsers. Then
came "a Memorandum of Articles which have been
repeatedly wrote for, and which we are in extremest
want of ; " cordage for eighty galleys ; seventeen or
eighteen hundred cannon-balls ; old useless iron that
would do for canister-shot ; a hundred seamen who were
no land-lubbers ; and, (to wind up all,) snowshoes for a
winter campaign on the chance of the Americans beat-
ing Carleton, and pursuing him home to Canada. What
lay in Arnold's own power was very thoroughly done.
Everything was foreseen, and almost every requisite for
a naval expedition was provided, except a chaplain. The
colonial ministers of religion were never very willing to
234
THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
embark on ship-board ; and, if any motive could over-
come their reluctance, it would hardly be the temptation
of sailing on a forlorn hope with Benedict Arnold. 1 His
final care was to get a medical officer for the flag-ship.
" I don't think it prudent," (he wrote,) "to go without
a surgeon. The surgeon's mate of Colonel St. Clair's
regiment has a good box of medicines, and will incline
to go with the fleet. I wish he could be sent here, or
some one who will answer to kill a man secundum artem.
Nothing but a surgeon prevents our proceeding." 2 Colo-
nel St. Clair's doctor declined to come ; and in the end
Arnold borrowed a case of instruments, and sailed with-
out him. It was his own affair. Until a battle was
fought, he himself was the only wounded man on board
the squadron. After a battle the chances were ten to
one that all the Americans, who did not feed the fishes
of Lake Champlain, might have their hurts treated by a
surgeon of the Royal Navy in the cock-pit of an English
war-ship.
Arnold's amphibious proceedings brought him into
many quarrels both on sea and land ; from all of which,
at this period of his career, he emerged a victor. The
first person with whom he came into collision was, as
might easily have been foreseen, the naval officer in
charge of the American squadron. Commodore Wyn-
koop made a stout fight against the degradation of hav-
ing to take his orders from an infantry general. "I
brought him to reason ; " Arnold wrote. " I have given
him to understand that, if he did not incline to remain
in the service, he would not be compelled to it." There
1 M Sir, I received yours yesterday, and am very much obliged to you
for your advice. As to your complaints of the morals of the people be-
longing to the Navy, I am now to let you know that I did not enter into
the Navy as a divine, and that I am not qualified to give directions in that
matter. The Congress whom I serve have made provision for a chaplain ;
but to my mortification I have not been able to get a single man to act
in that character, although I have applied to many. If none can be pro-
cured, I cannot but condole with you on the depravity of the times."
Commodore Hopkins to the Pastor of the First Congregational Church at
Newport; October 1776.
2 Arnold to Gates ; August 23, 1776.
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CROWN POINT
235
certainly could be no mistake about the meaning of the
letter which conveyed this warning. 1 Arnold handled
his pen something too much as if it were a bludgeon ;
but he saw the point in controversy as clearly as he dis-
cerned the key of a position in battle, and went for it as
straight. The outraged Commodore appealed in vain to
Gates, and from Gates to Schuyler. He was packed off
down the river to Albany ; and his place as second in
command was made over to a brigadier, who, like so
many American soldiers, was a practised seaman. " As
General Waterbury and General Arnold," (thus Gates
reported,) "are on the best terms, no dispute about com-
mand will retard the public service ; " which was well
for the public service, and very well indeed for General
Waterbury. Arnold's next antagonists were Colonel
Hazen, a personage of mark and merit, whom he accused
of wilful disobedience ; and Colonel John Brown, whom
he charged with having pilfered from captured British
stores. These disputes were carried before a court-mar-
tial of officers, who were treated by Arnold in their col-
lective capacity exactly as he would have behaved to any
individual among them who had been rash enough to
cross him. But, where a man is indispensable, the for-
bearance of those above him, while the crisis lasts, had
best be quite unlimited. " The warmth of General
Arnold's temper," (so his superior officer wrote from
Ticonderoga,) "might possibly lead him a little further
than is marked by the precise line of decorum to be
observed towards a court-martial. Seeing and knowing
all the circumstances, I am convinced that, if there was
a fault on one side, there was too much acrimony on the
other. I was obliged to act dictatorially, and dissolve
the Court-martial the instant they demanded General
1 " You must surely be out of your senses to say no order must he
obeyed but yours. Do you imagine that Congress has given you a superior
command over the Commander-in-Chief? If you do, give me leave to
say that you are much mistaken ; and, if you do not suffer my orders to be
instantly complied with, I shall be under the disagreeable necessity of
convincing you of your error by immediately arresting you." Arnold's
letter of August 18, 1776.
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236 THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
Arnold to be put in arrest. The United States must not
be deprived of that excellent officer's service at this pre-
cise moment." 1 General Schuyler was of the same mind,
and predicted that Arnold would always be the subject
of complaint from his subordinates, because his impar-
tiality and candour would not allow him to see impro-
priety of behaviour with impunity. The letter in which
that opinion was expressed called forth the following
response from Gates. " I am astonished at the calum-
nies that go to Congress against General Arnold. To
be a man of honour, in an exalted station, will ever excite
envy in the mean and undeserving. I am confident the
Congress will view whatever is whispered against Gen-
eral Arnold as the fouled stream of that poisonous foun-
tain, detraction." 2
These generous tributes to a great man of action,
whose fame was then unsullied, will always be read by
Americans with sorrowful interest. Arnold still wished
for nothing better than to be the servant of his country,
if only he were allowed to serve her uncontrolled, and
with rank and station which fairly represented his by no
means extravagant opinion of his own value. For the
present he had no ambition ungratified. He was very
popular with the rank and file of the army, and counted
many warm partisans among the officers. Abundant
supplies were forwarded northwards, from many quar-
ters, in response to his eager and ubiquitous impor-
tunities. Everywhere within the circle of his personal
influence courage revived, attended by hopes which he
knew how to inspire, but was too perspicacious unre-
servedly to entertain. The colonel, who had been left
in military command at Crown Point, bore delighted tes-
timony to the improved condition of the fleet. " It is
now," he wrote, "truly respectable. It goes down the
lake to-morrow under General Arnold. I make no doubt
it will prevent the enemy from coming up this year,
unless some extraordinary disaster should happen to
1 Letter from Gates in the last week of August 1 776.
2 Correspondence of Generals Schuyler and Gates in September 1 776.
GENERAL HOWE ON STATEN ISLAND
237
it." 1 All through August letters came south from Ti-
conderoga, narrating how much the Americans had to eat,
and how little they now feared the British. The gar-
rison, by the fifth of August, already mustered thirty-
five hundred effective men, and militia were marching
in fast. Ten days afterwards the multifarious elements
of the army had shaken down into their places ; and the
troops were already in fair discipline and in high spirits,
" for they had large quantities of fresh beef." Again a
month, and Gates wrote to Governor Trumbull that
fever and ague existed at Ticonderoga; but his com-
ments showed plainly that the season of prostration,
or even of depression, had passed away. " The same
climate," the General said, "that affects us, distresses
our enemies; but with this difference, that they have
not half the comforts which our troops enjoy. The
provisions delivered here are excellent, and plenty reigns
in the camp. The two hundred sheep sent by your Ex-
cellency are a seasonable supply. About a hundred
thousand feet of boards have been distributed to the
troops, so there has been little distress for want of tents."
Meanwhile Arnold had gone on ship-board, leaving all
those comforts behind him. The gratitude felt towards
him by the soldiers on shore evinced itself in their regrets
that he must henceforward live on salt provisions, which
were bad for his wound ; and the sympathy of lands-
men was increased by the knowledge that, the day
after he sailed, he had come in for a heavy gale. But
a storm on inland waters seemed a trifle to an old
West Indian skipper, whose cargo had sometimes been
of such a nature that, when Revenue cruisers were
in the offing, he had rather courted than feared foul
weather.
On the last day of June, 1776, Washington's Adjutant
General, at the request of his chief, wrote thus to the
President of the New Jersey Convention : " No doubt
General Howe is arrived at the Hook with a very large
1 Colonel Hartley's letter of August 81, 1776.
238 THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
force. It would be too dangerous a secret to trust to
a letter how inadequate our army is to encounter it. I
am therefore to enjoin the Honourable Body, over which
you preside, to exert their utmost efforts at this critical
juncture when, in all human probability, the fate of our
country, our lives, liberty, and property depend upon
the spirit and activity that will be shown in a very
short time." The place referred to in this communica-
tion was Sandy Hook, not ill described by a contem-
porary historian as a point of land at the entrance into
that confluence of sounds, creeks, and bays which is
formed by the peninsula, at the southern extremity of
which the city of New York stood ; by Staten Island and
Long Island; by the North and Raritan rivers; and by
the continent on either side of that network of estuaries. 1
Howe arrived at the rendezvous long before his time.
He had been desperately uncomfortable at Halifax, —
that nook of penury and cold, as it was styled by
Edmund Burke, 2 — where the barren soil could with
difficulty support the native population, and the lack of
room in the town was such that all the private soldiers
had been kept on ship-board during the whole of their
stay. Howe was to have waited there for the Hessians,
and for the English regiments which had been despatched
from home ports ; and now, in his impatience, he sailed
without them. He picked up on his way, and brought
with him, such of the Highlanders as had not been
intercepted by American privateers; but he reached
Sandy Hook a month earlier than the day that Clinton
and Cornwallis started from Charleston ; and he out-
stripped by a fortnight Lord Howe's fleet, which, for
operations of the nature that the brothers had in view,
was not less important than his own army.
The British troops were put ashore on Staten Island,
1 Annual Register for 1776 ; chapter v. of the " History of Europe."
The places named in this account of the New York and New Jersey cam-
paign may be found in a map at the end of the volume, adapted from sev-
eral plans in the Atlas belonging to Marshall's Life of Washington.
* Burke to Rockingham ; May 4, 1776.
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GENERAL HOWE ON STAT EN ISLAND
239
which was free of access, inasmuch as it had not been
included in Washington's scheme of defence. They were
received with an ovation ; for a number of local Tories
got together to celebrate the occasion by a bonfire,
which they fed with forty pounds' worth of Continental
paper-money, "damning the Congress, and saying they
would have nothing more to do with it." 1 Loyalists
flocked in from the main-land as soon as news of the
disembarkation was noised abroad. Sixty men, of whom
some carried muskets, came over from the Jerseys, and
announced that five hundred more would follow. They
expressed themselves as very anxious for the arrival of
the Admiral with offers of peace ; but they declared it
as their opinion that quiet would never be restored
until the rebels had been soundly beaten. Howe had
found Tryon, the Governor of New York, expecting him
at Sandy Hook on board a vessel, from the deck of
which, during a twelvemonth past, he had done his best
to administer his province for the advantage of the
Crown. 2 Tryon now gave the English Commander-in
Chief very accurate intelligence with regard to the
numbers and disposition of the Republican forces. The
Governor of New York had every reason to hate the
Revolution. It had put a stop to a course of proceed-
ings enormously lucrative to himself; of a sort which
was customary then, but in which no administrator of
a British colony would now venture to engage without
certain ruin to his career. 8 Tryon was reckoned the
ablest of the Royal deputies in America ; and he cer-
tainly was a crafty and, (whenever he got the chance,)
1 Letter from Staten Island ; July 8, 1776.
a Despatch of General Howe ; published in the Gentleman's Magazine
for August 1 776.
8 " The Tryons came late in June. They were taken to the Schuyler
country-place after some gala-making at Albany. Saratoga was looking
its loveliest. Here Mrs. Tryon stayed while the Governor and his host
were off on one of the land-purchasing expeditions which none of the
colonial governors were known to neglect. Vast purchases were made.
Governor Tryon acted as agent for a number of foreign noblemen. His
fees alone amounted to 22,000 I. ' A good summer's work,' Philip Schuy-
ler wrote." Memoirs of Catherine Schuyler; chapter viii.
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240 THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
a very cruel vindicator of what he regarded as the Royal
interests. No one else in King George's employment,
from first to last, did so much injury to the cause of the
master whom he served.
In 1779, when Tryon's rancour as an ex-Governor
had had three years to cool, he obtained command of
an expedition, made a descent upon the New England
coasts, and laid town and country waste ; not in the
hope of subduing, but for the avowed object of punish-
ing, the people of Connecticut. Wherever Tryon's
soldiers landed, they never re-embarked without leaving
misery and desolation behind them. They plundered
New Haven. They plundered Fairfield, and then set it
on fire. Two Episcopal churches, and four belonging
to other denominations, perished in the flames. From
Fairfield they went on to Norwalk, and burned the little
sea-port, with every building appropriated to Divine
worship. The story of these proceedings was told, with
damning fidelity and impartiality, by Mr. Justice Jones,
— an eminent Judge of New York Province, firm and
devoted in his loyalty to the Crown. " Upon the sack-
ing of the town of New Haven in Connecticut by Gen*
eral Tryon in June 1779, Yale College, situate at that
place, was plundered of a library consisting of many
thousand books which had been collecting for very near
a hundred years, with many curious and valuable manu-
scripts; besides a selection of well-chosen books, a
present to that seminary from the late Dean Berkeley,
afterwards Bishop of Cloyne, in Ireland, and known by
the name of The Dean's Library. In the same month,
upon plundering and burning the town of Norwalk, in
the same colony, under the orders of the same General,
a most elegant, large, beautiful, and well-collected
library, an heirloom which had for safety been removed
to Norwalk, was pillaged, carried to New York, and
disposed of by the thieves in the same manner as those
plundered in New York had been before disposed of.
All this was done with impunity, publicity, and openly.
No punishment was ever inflicted upon the plunder-
GENERAL HOWE ON ST A TEN ISLAND 24 1
ers." 1 Sir Henry Clinton, then Commander-in-Chief in
America, was deeply offended at the Royal troops having
been employed for such a purpose. But he was debarred
from animadverting on subordinate offenders, or from
protesting officially against Tryon's action, when once
he had entrusted the honour of the British army to one
who had been so indifferent a guardian of his own.
Staten Island, which was somewhat larger than Bute,
easily held the Royal army ; but the Jersey Whigs had
been provident enough to transport all the sheep and
cattle across the channel. The market afforded the
British soldiers nothing besides pickled pork, not so
different from their own salt pork that they cared to
pay sevenpence a pound for it ; and there were no
vegetables even for generals. Long-boats and launches,
manned from the crews of the Royal frigates which had
convoyed the troop-ships from Halifax, scoured the
coasts of New York Bay, and ascended the North River
for many miles above the city. But George Clinton, the
American officer entrusted with the care of the New
York Highlands, had posted strong parties at all the
landing-places, and had warned the farmers to drive
their flocks and herds up-country of an evening ; so
that the British foragers took very little, and that little
mostly from their friends. Their largest capture con-
sisted in live-stock, belonging to a partisan of the Royal
cause who accompanied them as guide; and they pil-
laged and burned a house high up the stream, in the
neighbourhood of Fort Montgomery, where Clinton was
quartered. " Commander Wallace," (so that General
reported,) " headed the party who committed this little
robbery. His share of the plunder was a handker-
chief full of salad, and a pig so poor that a crow would
scarcely deign to eat it. Another officer got a pot of
1 History of New York Province during (he Revolutionary War, by
the Honourable Thomas Jones, Justice of the Supreme Court of the Prov-
ince; Vol. I. chapter 7. Judge Jones manfully declared that to rob and
destroy defenceless, unfortified towns " was not a method of conciliating
the deluded."
PT. II.— VOL. I.
242 THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
jelly, and six bottles of castor oil. We thought the
owner so poor as not to need protection ; and he was a
noted Tory as well." 1
The region which became the scene of the approach-
ing campaign was of singular conformation, and pre-
sented, to the General responsible for repelling an
invader, problems, both political and military, which
may fairly be said to have been incapable of satisfac-
tory solution. The city of New York, then containing
twenty-two thousand inhabitants, and covering with its
streets and houses about six hundred acres, lay at the
southern end of Manhattan Island, which was an island
only in the same sense as the Isle of Thanet. It was in
fact a peninsula some fourteen miles long, and nowhere
more than two miles broad. The North, or Hudson,
River, as wide as Manhattan Island itself, skirted it on
the west ; and it was watered along the other flank by
the Haerlem River, and by a creek which went by the
name of the East River. This creek, a mile across,
separated the promontory where the city stood from
Long Island ; which extended almost due east for near
a hundred and twenty miles into the Atlantic Ocean.
It was a tract of land equal in superficial extent to
Somersetshire, and parts of it were as fertile and attrac-
tive as a pleasant English county. The resemblance is
acknowledged and cherished by New Yorkers who have
such an excess of leisure as to be able to spare one
morning in the week for recreation. Long Island, with
its grass-clad hills, and its autumn woods for a back-
ground in the landscape, has long been their favourite
country for fox hunting. That institution is nowhere
more expensively organised, and more replete with the
excitement of danger ; for an endless succession of
high timber fences reminds the sportsman rather of the
Roman Campagna than of a Warwickshire or Leices-
tershire pasture. Fox hunting is no novelty in that
1 Public Papers of George Clinton ; Published by the State of New
York, 1899. Letter from the same officer, of July 1776, in the American
Archives.
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GENERAL HOWE ON STATEN ISLAND
243
district. Years before the Revolution broke out a pro-
vincial satirist, in bad verse, had expressed wonder
that it should require so many dogs and men to kill an
animal, which itself made no great matter of killing a
score of fowls in a night. The foxes on Long Island
did not starve, for the hen-roosts were exceptionally
well stocked. The soil on the coast was rich, and the
farmers prosperous; possessing, as they did, famous
orchards, cornland of good quality, and flocks and herds
in abundance. After the island had been occupied by
the British, an American foraging party carried off three
thousand sheep, and four hundred horned cattle, as the
produce of a single raid. In the summer of 1776, how-
ever, the Revolutionary Government hesitated to treat
Long Island like Staten Island by confiscating, and
removing, the live-stock. That policy, applied on such
a vast scale, would have been barbarous, and indeed
impracticable ; for the inhabitants, very generally, were
faithful, and by no means passive, adherents of the
Crown. Their attitude had been so threatening that,
in January, Congress had meditated sending a powerful
force to keep them in awe ; and, shortly before Howe
appeared at Sandy Point, a number of them took arms
for the King, and retired to forests and morasses where
the Continental soldiers, whom Washington sent in
pursuit of them, were unable, and probably not very
desirous, to follow. 1
" Long Island," (a leading patriot declared,) " has the
greatest proportion of Tories, both of its own growth,
and of adventitious ones, of any part of this colony."
The island belonged to the province of New York ; and
the political condition of that province had a material
influence upon the military operations which were now
imminent. A correspondent of a Whig newspaper in
London, writing from New York in January 1776, com-
puted that the colony contained about two hundred
thousand people, and that forty thousand of them were
able to bear arms. Two thousand of these, at the most,
1 Washington's letters of January 23, May 21, and June 28, 1776.
244 THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
might be counted as lukewarm, or actively opposed to
the Revolution ; which left thirty-eight thousand fight-
ing men heartily devoted to the American cause. So
ran the story as dressed up for the readers of a party
journal ; but New York was in fact a stronghold of the
Crown, and contained more Loyalists than any other
among the thirteen provinces. " The inhabitants," said
an officer of the Continental army, " promise us three
thousand of City militia ; but we do not believe we shall
see half so many. If the strength of the Whigs be a
match for the Tories, it is as much as we shall ever
experience in our favour." 1 That was the case with the
city ; and it was the same in smaller towns, and through-
out the more thickly settled agricultural districts in
the southeast of the colony. Halfway through July a
partisan of the Revolution stated that in the county
where he lived, which was less Tory than most, one
hundred militiamen out of four hundred had already
been disarmed on account of their Royalist proclivities ;
and he unsparingly condemned the folly of bringing out
persons to oppose an invading army which they were
daily seeking opportunities to join.* Join it they did, in
great numbers, and of all sorts ; from the de Lanceys,
whose secession furnished Great Britain with two gen-
erations of capable military officers, down to citizens of
a somewhat poor type who loved their own skins better
than any political cause, and who accordingly attached
themselves to the party which had the least need of
their services as soldiers. 3
Loyalism, all the province of New York over, was
fashionable in every rank ; and those who go counter to
1 Colonel Jcdediah Huntington to Governor Trumbull; Camp at New
York, June 6, 1776.
a Egbert Benson to the New York Convention ; July 1776.
• " I have examined the prisoners," (General Greene reported on one
occasion,) " and find them ignorant cowardly fellows. Two are tailors,
and the other two common labourers. They candidly confess that they set
off for Staten Island, not with any intention of joining the enemy, but to
get out of the way of fighting here. It was reported that they were to go
into the Northern Army, and that almost all who went there died, or were
killed. The prospect was so shocking to their grandmothers and aur.ts
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GENERAL HOWE ON STATEN ISLAND
245
fashion, where politics are at fever-heat, are apt to find
their position very disagreeable in good society, and
quite unendurable in humbler and rougher circles. A
farmer complained to the Committee of Safety that,
when attending a cattle-mart, he had been much abused
and ill-treated because he was a Whig. His cockade
was snatched from his hat, and trodden on; his com-
panion, a Dutchman who was a staunch Republican,
had his hair pulled on account of his opinions ; and the
crowd grew still more mischievous when a loyal tavern-
keeper had served out some fresh lime punch, of which
the Whigs got none. The schoolmaster at Rye, on the
coast opposite Long Island, had lived there in peace for
fourteen years, saving money, and keeping on good
terms with his neighbours, until he aroused their antip-
athies by arguing in favour of the Revolution. On the
pretext that he had lent money to a person who kept a
disorderly tavern, he was committed to prison; and,
while he lay there, the townsfolk broke open his house,
and robbed him of twenty pounds without any explana-
tion, and of three hundred more on the pretence of tak-
ing bail. 1 The poor man admitted, in a most significant
sentence, that " he alone was a real friend to America
out of all the foolish and simple town of Rye." The
children and the ladies, as always, were uncompromising
politicians. An early, if not the first, protest against
the assertion of national independence was made by
some schoolboys who unfurled the Royal colours on a
day appointed by Congress for solemn fasting and
humiliation. The Governor of New Jersey informed
that they persuaded them to run away. Never did I see fellows more
frightened. They wept like a parcel of children. They don't appear
acquainted with any public matter. They have been Toryish, I fancy
not from principle, but from its being the prevailing sentiment in the
county."
1 The schoolmaster named, as the chief instigators, " that arch-Tory and
enemy to his country Timothy Wetmore, who has and does yet keep up the
spirit of Toryism in Rye, he being their Grand Moloch whom they adore
and worship; and a vile woman whose house is frequented only by per-
sons who discourse about the hanging of leading gentlemen who stand
gloriously for their country."
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246 THE AM ERICA X REVOLUTION
Washington that six or seven women had come over to
that province from New York. " Though they appear to
be Whigs, they have a number of stories to tell which
discourage the weaker part of our inhabitants. The sex
are mistresses of infinite craft and subtlety, and I never
read of a great politician who did not employ petticoats
to accomplish his designs. Certain it is that the great-
est politician on record, (I mean the Devil,) applied
himself to a female agent to involve mankind in sin and
ruin."
Most of the rich people in New York, (and the rich
were many,) declared themselves more or less openly
against the Revolution. Enough among the leading
citizens to form a fair-sized viceregal court lived with
Tryon on his ship in the harbour. Others remained in
their town mansions, taking care that his behests were
obeyed as if he were still at Government House ; 1 send-
ing information, and assurances of fidelity, to General
Howe ; and never losing an opportunity of giving their
bad word to the Republic. One ingenious aristocrat
put about a theory that Washington was for ever march-
ing and counter-marching his troops through the city,
like the manager of a second-rate theatre, in order to
make a great show of a few men ; which was all the more
objectionable, (it was added,) because the privates of the
Continental army were so unlike soldiers, and the officers
bore so distant a resemblance to gentlemen, that no per-
son of taste would care to see them pass his door twice.
Another promised that the King's standard should float
on the public buildings of New York before the King's
birthday, even if he himself had to hoist it with his own
hands; whispered it about that matters would mend
when a dozen persons whom he could name in the town
of Albany had been hanged ; " and further endeavoured
by artful insinuations to depreciate the Continental cur-
rency." More practical members of the same party
1 "The city seems to he entirely under the government of Tryon, and
the captain of the man-of-war." Washington to Joseph Reed; January
3». 1776.
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GENERAL HOWE ON STAT EN ISLAND
247
took a shorter path towards a similar end, and counter-
feited the notes issued by the State Conventions of
Massachusetts and Connecticut. The individuals, who
had been placed on a suspected list as enemies of
America, were of many occupations, and every diversity
of outward appearance ; — a licensed victualler, with no
sign-board, four doors from the corner of Broadway ; a
fat man in a blue coat ; a short thick man in a white
coat ; a silversmith who had lately been ridden on a rail ;
two young gentlemen, who shut themselves up at home,
and refused to train ; a son that threatened his father
with the gallows if he would not sign a paper against a
Congress or a Committee ; a shoemaker living next to
the sign of the Buck, who talked too freely to his jour-
neyman, questioning the right of Congress to raise
soldiers, and wishing, with very strong asseverations,
that all the townsmen of New York were as big Tories
as the Mayor. That constituted an exacting standard
of Loyalism ; for the Mayor was a partisan who shrank
from nothing. Very confidential messages had long
been passing between his parlour in the city, and Gov-
ernor Tryon's cabin on board the Royal cruiser in the
Bay. Arrangements were made to blow up the powder
magazines, and to kidnap Washington and his principal
officers. One of the General's own bodyguards had
been suborned to do the blackest part of the business ;
and the man was said to have accomplices among his
companions. It would have required a numerous, and a
very determined, gang of traitors to carry off George
Washington alive and against his will; but all who were
in the secret perfectly well understood what the seizing
and securing the person, whether of a king in his palace,
or of a Commander-in-Chief in the midst of his army,
always meant, and always will mean. That hackneyed
euphemism for assassination never saves the neck of an
obscure hireling who has the courage of his wickedness ;
although it may salve the conscience, and possibly screen
the reputation, of more high-placed conspirators. The
plot was detected ; the Mayor was thrown into gaol ; the
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248
THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
guilty soldier was tried by court-martial, and executed in
a field near the Bowery ; and Washington, who seldom
let slip an opportunity of instilling a moral lesson into
his younger comrades, earnestly cautioned the troops
"to avoid lewd women, who, by the confession of this
poor criminal, first led him into practices which ended
in an untimely and ignominious death." 1
So deeply and equally was opinion divided all through
this tract of country which Washington had undertaken
to maintain in obedience to the Revolutionary Govern-
ment, and to protect against the attack of an army
larger and better than his own. During an interview at
Philadelphia with the Committee, appointed by Congress
to gather his view on the military necessities of the
nation, he had emphatically declared that success was
all but impossible unless the Americans were to the
English in a proportion of two to one. And now, for
the combined purpose of holding in check a disaffected
population within his lines, and of keeping the British
outside them, he had at his disposal a force which, as
compared with the enemy, stood in the proportion of
only two to three. Nor could he shut his eyes to a con-
tingency, exceedingly likely to occur, under which the
circumference of those lines would be enlarged to an
extent altogether beyond his means for defending them.
If Admiral Howe's ships could silence, or slip past, the
outer batteries, they might ascend the East River on the
left, and the North River on the right, of the American
position ; General Howe might, in that case, land on the
peninsula of Manhattan at any spot which he preferred
along thirty miles of open coast ; and, if once General
Howe disembarked his troops in rear of the city, New York
must fall without a blow. Nor was that all. The case,
in the end, would not be less grave even if Lord Howe
failed to force a passage up the rivers, and was obliged
to confine himself to the Bay. To defend New York it
1 The material of the last three paragraphs is derived from many sources ;
but principally from the American Archives of the year 1776, from Wash-
ington's Letters, and from Sabine's Loyalists of the American Revolution.
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GENERAL HOWE ON STATEN ISLAND 249
was absolutely necessary to hold the heights of Brooklyn
opposite the city, which commanded New York within
easy artillery fire, just as Bunker's Hill commanded
Boston ; 1 and the heights of Brooklyn were on Long
Island, whither General Howe might transport all his
troops at pleasure. There he would find a magnificent
base of operations ; abundant provisions ; inexhaustible
forage ; and farmers so much attached to the Crown
that they would almost have been prepared to feed his
men and horses for nothing, and were still more ready
to sell him their produce at war prices. To dispute the
possession of Long Island against Howe's whole army,
Washington could only afford to spare a portion of the
American force ; and that portion, whether greater or
smaller, if once beaten was almost certainly lost; for
Brooklyn was separated from New York by a deep
navigable channel of salt water. Should battle be joined
on Long Island, the American generals might be never
so skilful; but the most consummate tactics on their
part, (if such indeed were forthcoming,) could do little
to obviate the defects of a hopeless strategical situation.
With this prospect before them, some Americans held
that the most prudent, as well as the most truly coura-
geous, policy would be to destroy the supplies in Long
Island; to sacrifice New York; and to withdraw the
Revolutionary army, in unbroken strength, to a care-
fully selected position in the interior of the country.
That opinion, however, was held by very few ; and those
few were under no temptation to proclaim it. Nine out
of ten members of Congress, and ninety-nine out of a
hundred among the partisans who had elected them,
were for fighting at all hazards, and as far to the front
as possible. The strategy of withdrawal appeared posi-
tively despicable to an average Whig politician at Phila-
1 Those are the words employed by Mr. Charles Francis Adams, the
younger, in his article on the Battle of Long Island. Military criticisms
by Mr. Adams are those of a born historian, who has served through a
great war, and has had plenty of time since to think over the lessons which
his old campaigns taught him.
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250 THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
delphia, especially to one who hailed from a district
within the region which was the seat of war. " Is New
York to be evacuated, as well as Long Island, without
fighting? Or will our army, like the Romans of old,
attack the enemy wherever they find them, knowing
that death is to be chosen rather than life upon the
terms our enemies will surfer us to hold it? " Those ex-
pressions were employed by a New York representative,
whose desperate patriotism was confessedly stimulated
by the reflection that delegates from a State, which had
been conquered by the British, could not hope any
longer to be repaid their expenses at Philadelphia. 1
During this period of his career Washington con-
sidered himself as the servant of Congress, bound " im-
plicitly to obey their orders with a scrupulous exact-
ness," 2 even at the risk of his military reputation. He
did not hold out to his employers any definite assurance
of victory ; nor on the other hand did he dissuade them
from imposing on his acceptance a plan of campaign
based on the retention of New York city. He confined
himself to promising them his utmost exertions under
every disadvantage. Though the appeal, (he owned,)
might not terminate so happily as could be wished, yet
he trusted that any advantage the enemy might gain
would cost them dear. This much he said ; and, from
that time forward, he held his peace. He never, either
then or thereafter, pleaded that he had acted under com-
pulsion, or endeavoured to shift upon others his share
of responsibility for the misfortunes which befell the
army. His silence in the face of criticism was complete
and lifelong. Some of Washington's admirers have
done their best to make out a case for him by arguing
1 Letter from a member of Congress for New York ; August io, 1776.
a Those were Washington's words ; and that was the interpretation put
upon his conduct by Charles Lee, who wrote thus to Gates: "The Con-
gress seems to stumble at every step ; I do not mean one or two of the
cattle, but the whole stable. I have been very free in delivering my
opinion to 'em. General Washington is much to blame in not menacing
'era with resignation, unless they refrain from unhinging the army with
their absurd interference."
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AN INTERLUDE IN WAR
2 5 I
that, if he had not detained the British all through the
autumn within a few miles of the sea-coast, Howe would
have pushed on to Albany, taken Gates in the rear,
crushed him up against Carleton, and so have finished
the war before ever the year ended ; but nothing of all
this was uttered, or written, by Washington. The world
does not know, and never will know, whether he followed
his own unbiassed judgement of what was the least
ruinous expedient in an almost impossible situation ; or
whether he conformed reluctantly to the will of his offi-
cial superiors; or whether, (for he was a man like
others,) he could not bear to disappoint the belief of his
countrymen that the General who had re-conquered
Boston would succeed in retaining New York. In any
case it may safely be affirmed that, if Washington aimed
at preserving the city, he was trying for an impossibility ;
and that, if his object was to prevent the British from
reaching Albany, he should have waited for them further
up the Hudson, on ground carefully reconnoitred and
prepared, and with an army which had not been dimin-
ished and demoralised by a series of unsuccessful engage-
ments. The fact remains that in August 1776 he placed,
and kept, his troops in a position where they were certain
to be defeated, and where, when defeated, they would
most probably be surrounded and destroyed.
It soon became evident that all hope of confining the
British to a frontal attack upon the southern extremity
of the New York peninsula would have to be abandoned.
Lord Howe had sailed from Spithead before the middle
of May ; although tidings of his arrival in America did
not reach England until the end of September. The
Opposition journalists in London were furious at what
they suspected to be a wilful suppression of important
news, and complained that nothing more was published
about Howe's movements than if he were a mandarin,
commanding a fleet of junks in the service of the Em-
peror of China. They calculated the millions of pounds
that had been spent since the year opened, and compared
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252 THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
them with the very minute amount of satisfaction and
amusement which, as a reader of the newspapers, the
taxpayer had obtained for his money. 1 But in truth
the fault lay with the east wind, which had delayed
the American packet ; and the continued silence of the
London Gazette was not chargeable to the Government
censor, nor to any sloth on the part of the British
admiral. Lord Howe had been prompt enough. He
touched at Halifax on the first of July; and, on the
twelfth, Washington informed Congress that a ship of
war, flying St. George's flag at her foretop-mast-head,
had that morning appeared at Sandy Hook, and had
been received with a general salute from all the Royal
vessels which lay in the harbour.
On his way to the south Lord Howe met the Boston
squadron, retiring to Halifax with one shot-hole in the
upper works of the flag-ship ; and the Commodore ex-
plained that he was shifting his quarters from Nantasket
Road because he had been annoyed by batteries. Lord
Howe quietly observed that in the last war he, for his
part, sought batteries instead of avoiding them. 2 It was
a habit which he never lost. In the afternoon of his
arrival off Staten Island two men-of-war, with a favour-
able breeze and on a flowing tide, carrying breastworks
of sand-bags on deck as a protection against rifle-bullets,
ran past the American works. They took their station
five-and-thirty miles above New York, in Haverstraw Bay,
where the Hudson River was more than a league across.
There they remained, as little damaged as if they were
lying opposite Gravesend after a peaceful journey up
the Thames from the Nore, and, (to all appearance,)
1 On September 20, 1776, the London Ei'tning Post thus addressed the
Ministry: " Lord Howe sailed from St. Helens on the 1 2th May last, with
a considerable fleet This is 139 days ago, or to-morrow will be 20 weeks,
and you have never given any account whatsoever about his Lordship or
his fleet, cither good, bad, or indifferent. Notwithstanding this dead silence,
you have had this year the fingering of fifteen millions of the people's
money, without a shilling of it being left, or without a single act being done
by either the land, or sea, department but what are disgraceful to this un-
happy kingdom."
a The Last Journals of Horace Walpole.
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AN INTERLUDE IN WAR
253
in quite as secure a berth. Their awnings were spread
against the summer sun ; and their boats ranged to and
fro on the current, taking the soundings, and watching
an opportunity for plunder. To those who looked into
the future it was evident that the city of New York was
as good as taken ; and the comfort of farmers in the
provincial districts was already destroyed. Three regi-
ments of local militia were called out to man the forts ;
and smaller detachments bivouacked at frequent intervals
along the banks. The service was of such a nature that
night was no less toilsome, and more anxious, than the
day. There was brief and broken sleep for the minute-
men, with nothing to occupy their waking thoughts
except a mental picture of the most noble crop, which
had ripened within their life-time, rotting on the stalks. 1
Their leaders also had a sacrifice to make, the greatness
of which it would not be easy to appraise in money.
General George Clinton could not spare the time for
a journey to Philadelphia in order to affix his name, as a
New York delegate, to the Declaration of Independence ;
and the case of Colonel Robert Livingston was harder
still, for he had been one of the five members who drafted
the document which he was now too busy to sign.
There was a project much nearer Lord Howe's heart
than that of exchanging cannon-shots with those whom
he regarded as his injured, rather than his misguided
and erring, fellow-countrymen. Old quartermasters,
who had sailed with him all the world over, professed to
know when a general action was impending by " Black
Dick " being seen to smile ; but the admiral, at no time
of his life, was ever so keen to fight Frenchmen as he
1 "The Men turn out of their Harvest Fields to defend their Country
with surprizing Alacrity. The absence of so many of them, however, at
this Time, when their Grain is perishing for want of the Sickle, will greatly
distress the Country. I wish a less number might answer the Purpose."
Ginton to Washington ; July 15, 1 776.
The Americans after a while extemporised a small squadron of armed
galleys, and a couple of fire-ships, which at length made Haverstraw Bay a
hot anchorage for Englishmen. The two men-of-war dropped down the
river, and rejoined their fleet on the 18th August, having remained for the
space of five weeks in the heart of the enemy's country.
254
THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
now was eager to make friends of the colonists. He
had inherited the title of a gallant brother, more beloved
by Americans, not indeed than Lord Chatham, but than
any Englishman of eminence who had ever set his foot
on American soil. He himself had been prime mover in
the last attempt made, before Benjamin Franklin took
his departure from Europe, to draw the mother-country
and her revolted provinces once more together. Lord
Howe's advent as a pacificator, and a supposed plenipo-
tentiary, was heralded by the sanguine anticipations of
all partisans of peace whom he left behind him in
London. The Lord Mayor and Common Council, sitting
in the Guildhall, had wished him well in his character of
negotiator, and had prayed the Government to publish
a specification of the powers which he carried with him,
in order that the King's benevolent intentions might not
be misrepresented by demagogues in the colonies who
desired to keep the quarrel open. Private persons wrote
eagerly and often, urging their correspondents in
America to trust the British Government, and to make
much of its emissary. " Do, my dear friend," (so one
such letter ran,) " let me persuade you that Lord Howe
goes to America as a mediator, and not a destroyer. He
has declared he had rather meet you, and that immedi-
ately on his arrival, in the wide field of argument, than
in the chosen ground of battle." 1 In America there was
every disposition to treat Lord Howe with respect, and
a widespread belief that the offers which he brought
were of a nature to be acceptable. Pamphleteers of the
Revolutionary party, if they cared to retain their readers,
were obliged to speak gently both of him and of his
mission. The most uncivil of all these writers felt him-
self bound to promise that the colonists would be as
courteous at the Council Board as they were valiant in
the field ; and that, if agreement proved impossible, the
British Commissioners should be bowed out genteelly,
1 Dennis dc Berdt in London to Joseph Reed of Philadelphia ; May 3,
1 776. Mr. Reed was a trusted and valued informant of I Aird Dartmouth, —
as long as the colonist cared to write letters, or the peer ventured to re-
ceive them.
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AN INTERLUDE IN WAR < j 2$$
and not dismissed after the fashion in which-flanun the
son of Nahash treated the messengers of David. 1
As a first step towards the accomplishment of his
amicable purpose, Lord Howe endeavoured to place him-
self in communication with the American whose co-opera-
tion he was especially anxious to secure. A letter for
M George Washington Esquire " was sent to New York,
under a flag of truce, and was returned unopened, never
having got further than the guard-boat which lay off
the landing-place at Castle Garden. A few days after-
wards Colonel Paterson, the Adjutant General of the
Royal army, obtained an interview with Washington,
and handed to him an envelope bearing the same super-
scription. 2 Colonel Paterson, in obedience to his instruc-
tions, addressed the American Commander-in-Chief as
His Excellency, and assured him that Lord Howe and
his brother did not mean to derogate from the respect
or rank of General George Washington, and held his
person and character in the highest esteem. Washing-
ton, (so a story goes,) looked at the letter, and remarked
that it must be for a planter of the name, residing in
the State of Virginia, with whom he was acquainted,
and to whom he would deliver it, with the seal unbroken,
after the war was over. That part of the anecdote rests
upon French tradition, and was probably manufactured
on the banks of the Seine for the gratification of Pari-
sian supper-tables. Washington's own account of the
affair was marked by his customary gravity and preci-
sion. He reported to Congress that, while he would not
sacrifice essentials to punctilio, he had in this instance
deemed it his duty towards his country to insist upon a
1 A Watchman ; Philadelphia, June 13, 1 776. Other passages in the
same production show the patriotism of the author to have been of a very
pronounced type. " If I forget thee, Oh Lexington, let my right hand forget
his cunning ! Yea, let my right finger forget how to pull the trigger ! "
That was his style when he was writing solely to please himself.
2 The actual address on this second letter was " George Washington
Esquire, &c. &c. &c." Washington was earnestly entreated to believe
that the magic symbols, which followed his name, implied every title of
honour that he might desire to read into them.
256 THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
mark of respect which, as an individual, he would will-
ingly have waived. Congress, in return, complimented
him for having acted with dignity becoming his station,
and enjoined all other officers to follow his example, and
receive no messages from the enemy but such as were
directed to them in the characters they respectively sus-
tained. The principle involved is clearly laid down in
a despatch which Washington, on a previous and some-
what similar occasion, had written to General Gage, as
the commander of the British garrison in Boston. " You
affect, Sir, to despise all rank not derived from the same
source as your own. I cannot conceive one more hon-
ourable than that which flows from the uncorrupted
choice of a brave and free people, the purest source and
original fountain of all power." That was news to such
as Gage ; but the Howes were both of them born Whigs,
who did not need to be indoctrinated with an obvious
political truth, — as well as men of sense, who made a
point of calling people by the names which they called
themselves. It was noticed that Lord Howe, when
conversing with Americans, spoke of the colonies as
"States" ; and General Howe informed the Ministry at
home that, if necessity arose for conducting negotiations
about the exchange of prisoners and the treatment of
wounded, he intended, since once the question had been
started, always to give an American general his full
military title.
Lord Howe, in his cabin at sea, had composed a cir-
cular letter to the Royal governors of the colonies,
accompanied by a Declaration setting forth the nature
of his authority as Commissioner from the King, together
with the terms of reconciliation which the Cabinet had
sanctioned. These documents were transmitted to
Washington, who duly forwarded them to Congress.
It at once became evident why the ministerial offers had
been kept a secret from the London Corporation, and
from all other communities which were guided by reason
and good feeling ; for those offers amounted to nothing
more than a bare promise of pardon and favour to all
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AN INTERLUDE IN WAR
who should return to allegiance and assist in restoring
public tranquillity. Congress forthwith printed the
papers in full, with the object, (so their Resolution was
worded,) that the good people of the United States might
know the conditions of peace with the expectation of
which the insidious Court of Great Britain had endeav-
oured to amuse and disarm them, and that the few who
had founded hopes on the justice or moderation of their
late King might now at length be convinced that their
valour alone could save their liberty. 1 George Wash-
ington took his share of the Royal clemency as a direct
insult which he could not away with. His attitude re-
calls to a reader of Beaumont and Fletcher the dialogue
between a calumniated subject, and an estranged sov-
ereign, in the stately drama of " The Maid's Tragedy."
Melantius. Where I am clear,
I will not take forgiveness of the gods,
Much less of you.
King. Nay, if you stand so stiff,
I shall call back my mercy.
Melantius. I want smoothness
To thank a man for pardoning of a crime
I never knew.
The American Commander-in-Chief, in a printed letter,
described Howe and his brother as nothing more than a
couple of agents dispensing pardons to repentant sin-
ners ; and he openly warned his soldiers not to heed a
report, set about by designing persons, that the British
admiral had brought with him propositions of peace.
His own duty, (he told the army,) obliged him to declare
that no propositions had been made ; but on the con-
trary, from the best intelligence which he could procure,
the Americans might expect to be attacked as soon as
the wind and tide should prove favourable. He hoped,
therefore, that every man's mind and arms would be
1 Resolution of Friday, July 19, 1776. On the 23rd July a Member of
Congress wrote to Charles Lee from Philadephia : " The Tories are quiet,
but very surly. Lord Howe's proclamation leaves them not a single fila-
ment of their cobweb doctrine of reconciliation."
FT. II. — vol. I s
258 THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
prepared for action, in order to show the whole world
that freemen contending on their own land were superior
to any mercenaries on earth. 1
John Adams accused Lord Howe of pursuing a Mach-
iavellian policy ; 2 but the admiral was a straightforward
sailor, who resembled the celebrated Italian statesman
in one point only. Lord Howe's patriotism embraced
all his countrymen, in whatever part of the world their
fortune had fixed them ; and he was now striving to
restore amity and concord between two great sections
of the British people as strenuously as ever Machiavelli
had laboured, in his own very peculiar fashion, for the
unity of Italy. Even after the armies had met, and the
English had gained a victory, Lord Howe persevered in
his attempt to settle the dispute by pacific methods.
He adopted as an intermediary the first American gen-
eral who was taken prisoner in battle. That general
was the good-hearted, but loose-tongued and feather-
headed, Sullivan ; — an instrument well suited to an
honourable but visionary undertaking. Sullivan pre-
sented himself before Congress with no credentials;
carrying no written proposals from the British Commis-
sioners; ahd provided with nothing more definite than
certain hazy recollections which he had brought away
from a conversation with Lord Howe. No notes of that
conversation were in existence, for the very sufficient
reason that none had been taken ; nor had a minute
embodying the conclusions, at which the two parties
arrived, been agreed upon between them.
From such offhand diplomacy nothing but confusion
and scandal could come. Sullivan's appearance struck
dismay into every patriot acute enough to perceive that
the only practical consequence of listening to those
shadowy overtures must be to throw upon Congress the
unpopularity of prolonging the war. M Oh the decoy-
duck ! " exclaimed John Adams. " Would that the first
bullet from the enemy had passed through his brain ! "
1 Washington to Gates ; July 19, 1776. General Order of August 20.
* John Adams to Mrs. Adams; September 8, 1776.
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AN INTERLUDE IN WAR
259
Lord Howe would scarcely have been better pleased
than Adams if he had been present when Sullivan told
his story. That impulsive orator began by confiding to
all the members of Congress, and any other citizen
who cared to listen in the gallery, that the British
admiral maintained the extreme colonial opinion, and
denied the right of Parliament to tax America. He
then proceeded to deliver what he called his verbal
message ; and, (since his hearers were very much better
men of business than himself,) he was requested to
put it on paper. On paper the message was vague and
illusory, — insinuating a conception of Lord Howe's
powers, and of the views held by the British Ministry,
so hopeful as to be positively dishonest; but it was the
dishonesty of well-intentioned, inaccurate men, who con-
trived to deceive themselves. Howe, in his zeal for
peace, had promised more than he could perform ; and
Sullivan had persuaded himself to remember a great
deal more than Howe had said. The most substantial
part of the communication was to the effect that the
British Commissioner was forbidden to recognise the
authority, or even the official existence, of Congress;
but that he would most gladly have a conference with
some of the members whom he would consider, for the
present, only as private gentlemen. Congress, as be-
came it, resolved that it could not with propriety send
any members to confer with his Lordship in their pri-
vate characters ; but that, ever desirous of establishing
peace on reasonable terms, it would despatch a commit-
tee of its body to learn whether, under the powers which
he possessed, he could treat with persons appointed to
act on behalf of America. That resolution was passed
on the fifth of September; and next day Edward
Rutledge of South Carolina, John Adams, and Ben-
jamin Franklin were selected by ballot to serve on the
Committee.
To a lover of peace it might have seemed that a more
promising choice than that of Franklin could hardly
have been made. Up to the very moment that his
260 THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
trunks were packed for leaving England he had been
engaged with Lord Howe in an honourable conspiracy
to stop the war. The earliest letter that the admiral
wrote to an American, after he arrived in American
waters, was a greeting to his worthy friend, Benjamin
Franklin; and in that letter Lord Howe represented
himself as inspired by the hope that he might gratify
the King's paternal solicitude by promoting the estab-
lishment of a lasting union between Great Britain and
the colonies. But already the colonist, to whom these
amiable words were addressed, had no mind to resusci-
tate the paternal and filial relation in what he hencefor-
ward regarded as international, and not as colonial,
politics. He was no longer the same Benjamin Franklin
with whom the Whig nobleman had conversed in whis-
pers over Miss Howe's chess-table. An American
colonel, on a visit to the British flag-ship with a mes-
sage from Washington, happened to be in attendance
when Franklin's reply came to hand. According to the
account given by this officer, Lord Howe's countenance,
as he read onward, frequently exhibited marks of aston-
ishment ; and, when he had mastered the contents of
the letter, he lamented that his old friend had expressed
himself very warmly. Warm, indeed, the effusion was.
Americans, (so Franklin wrote,) could not by any possi-
bility even dream of submission to a Government which
had burned their defenceless towns in the midst of win-
ter ; had excited savages to massacre their farmers, and
slaves to murder their planters; and was even now
bringing over legions of German hirelings to deluge
their settlements with blood. " Long did I endeavour,
with unfeigned and unwearied zeal, to preserve from
breaking that fine and noble China Vase, the British
empire. Your Lordship may possibly remember the
tears of joy which wet my cheek when, at your good
sister's in London, you once gave me expectations that
a reconciliation might soon take place. I had the mis-
fortune to find those expectations disappointed, and to
be treated as the cause of the mischief I was labouring
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AN INTERLUDE IN WAR
26l
to prevent. My consolation was that I retained the
friendship of many wise and good men in that country ;
and, among the rest, some share in the regard of Lord
Howe." 1
Franklin and his brother Commissioners accepted the
charge which Congress imposed on them ; although they
had no hope, and little desire, that any very tangible
result would ensue. There was yet more cause for
despair than they knew of. Lord Howe's powers
extended no further than the offer of a pardon ; and
from all hope of pardon the Privy Council had expressly
excepted John Adams by name. That formidable fact
was unknown to Adams. He was not aware that, to the
mind's eye of the British admiral, he would appear at
the conference with a halter round his neck ; and yet
for reasons, public and not personal, he repaired to that
conference most unwillingly. Adams had been entirely
unconvinced by the arguments put forward by Congress-
men who were in favour of the negotiation. " Some,"
he wrote, " think it will occasion a delay of military
operations; which we much want. I am not of that
mind. Some think it will clearly throw the odium of
continuing this war on his Lordship and his master. I
wish it may. Others think it will silence the Tories and
establish the timid Whigs. I wish this also, but do not
expect it. All these arguments, and twenty others as
mighty, would not have convinced me of the necessity,
propriety, or utility, if Congress had not iletermined on
it. I was against it from first to last. All sides agreed
in sending me. You will hear more of this embassy.
It will be famous enough." 2
1 Lord Howe to Franklin; on board the Eagle, June 20, 1776.
Franklin to Lord Howe ; Philadelphia, July 20, 1776. Colonel Palfrey
to President Hancock ; July 31, 1776.
It is curious to observe the names of the transports which brought the
British army across the ocean ; the Felicity, the Three Sisters, the Amity's
Admonition, and the Good Intent. The First Grenadiers sailed in the
Friendship, and the Sixty-fourth regiment in the Father's Goodwill. It is
difficult to believe that these vesseli were not specially re-christened for
the voyage, and that Admiral Lord Howe had nothing to do with it.
2 John Adams to James Warren ; Philadelphia, September 8, 1776.
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262 THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
Franklin, who had been far from well, was once
again in excellent case. When acting as commissioner
to the Northern army he had felt his age for the first
time ; and towards the end of May he came back from
Canada an invalid. At one point on the route he did
not expect to return alive, and addressed to his friends
at home a communication which, for a valedictory
epistle, was singularly cheerful ; 1 but before August
he had cured himself by temperance, and by setting
in practice those quaintly expressed theories of health
which his observation had taught him, some scores of
years before they became the truisms of medical practice.
There was better travelling-ground between Philadel-
phia and the British head-quarters in New York Bay,
than among those wild and inhospitable regions which
separated Albany from St. John's and Montreal ; and
yet, as they drew near the scene of active hostilities, the
three Committeemen found their journey not without
its hardships. " The taverns," wrote Adams, "were so
full that we could with difficulty obtain entertainment.
At Brunswick but one bed could be procured for Dr.
Franklin and me, in a chamber little larger than the
bed, without a chimney, and with one small window.
The window was open, and I shut it close. ' Oh,' says
Franklin, 'don't shut the window. We shall be suffo-
cated ! ' I answered, I was afraid of the evening air.
Dr. Franklin replied : ' Open the window, and come to
bed, and I will convince you. I believe you are not
acquainted with my theory of colds.' Opening the
window, and leaping into bed, I said I had read his
letters to Dr. Cooper; but the theory was so little con-
sistent with my experience that I thought it a paradox.
However, I had so much curiosity to hear his reasons
that I would run the risk of a cold." The Doctor then
1 '* I am here on ray way to Canada, detained by the present state of
the Lakes, in which the unthawed ice obstructs navigation. I begin to
apprehend that I have undertaken a fatigue that, at ray time of life, may
prove too much for me. So I sit down to write to a few friends by way
of farewell." Franklin to Josiah Quincy ; Saratoga, April 15, 1776.
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AN INTERLUDE IN WAR 263
began to harangue on the theme that catarrhs were
usually produced by over-eating and stuffy rooms, and
in the course of a few minutes sent himself and his
bedfellow fast asleep. 1
They both were in somewhat of a holiday humour. To
these terribly overworked men the excursion presented
the character of an agreeable jaunt. Except when they
were travelling on public business, their unpaid and
unassisted toil, — for at Philadelphia they had neither
salary nor secretary, — seemed likely to allow them no
rest on that side the grave ; or rather, in the event of
their country being conquered, on that side the gibbet.
They reached Amboy, at the mouth of the Raritan, on
the eleventh September, and were rowed to Staten
Island by the admiral's own boat's crew. Lord Howe,
deeply disapproving, was privy to the fell intentions
which his Government harboured towards one, at least,
of the American Commissioners; and he accordingly
had sent across the water an English officer, with an
intimation that he might be retained in the American
camp as a hostage for their safety. Adams and his
colleagues exchanged a few words in private, and then
requested this gentleman to return in their company to
the British side of the channel. " We told the officer,"
(so Adams wrote,)" that, if he held himself under our
direction, he must go back with us. He bowed assent,
and we all embarked in his Lordship's barge. As we
1 During his last three years in London, Franklin, as if he had nothing
else to think about, paid great attention to " the causes of colds or
rheums." Much useful advice, and still more amusement, may be gathered
from his letters to Doctor Samuel Cooper, to Benjamin Rush, and to
Monsieur Dubourg ; as well as from his Preparatory Notes and Hints for
writing a Paper concerning what is called Catching Cold.
John Adams never forgot the night at New Brunswick. He heard the
news of Franklin's death, when at last it came, the less inconsolably on
learning that the Doctor had fallen a sacrifice to his own theory ; " having
caught the violent cold, which finally choked him, by sitting for some
hours at a window with the cold air blowing in upon him." Whichever
of the two was right on this particular medical question, Adams undoubt-
edly succeeded, (and it was not the least of his achievements,) in living
for a good many more years than Franklin.
264 THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
approached the shore, his Lordship came down to the
water's edge to receive us, and, looking at the officer,
he said, ' Gentlemen, you make me a very high compli-
ment, and you may depend upon it, I will consider it as
the most sacred of things.' We walked up to the house
between lines of grenadiers, looking fierce as ten furies,
and making all the grimaces, and gestures, and motions
of their muskets which, (I suppose,) military etiquette
requires, but which we neither understood nor re*
garded." The house had been inhabited by soldiers,
and was as dirty as a stable ; but Lord Howe had
prepared a large handsome room with a carpet of
moss and green sprigs, which made it " not only whole-
some, but romantically elegant ; " and there was a table
spread with good bread, good claret, cold ham, tongues,
and mutton.
John Adams, if man ever did, knew the difference
between play and work ; and he now wrote about trifles
because the nature of his embassy forbade him to expect
that he would find anything of solid political importance
to record. The serious part of the business was over
in a single interview. Lord Howe assured the three
Congressmen that, before accepting the office of Com-
missioner, he had stipulated for power to confer with
any persons whom he should think proper. He had
distinctly forewarned the British Government, (so he
stated,) of his intention to meet in a friendly way pre-
cisely those whom the Cabinet called rebels, because
they were the men best acquainted with colonial griev-
ances. This piece of information, set off by a few
courteous flourishes, was the beginning and the end of
what the Admiral had to say. The Americans, in return,
represented to his Lordship that, since he left London,
Independence had been declared at Philadelphia with
the full approbation of all the colonies; that those colo-
nies now considered themselves as States, and were
settling, or had already settled, their forms of govern-
ment accordingly ; and that it was not within the com-
petence of Congress to agree on their behalf that they
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AN INTERLUDE IN WAR
265
should revert to a condition of dependence upon the
British Crown. Lord Howe replied that, such being
the case, the situation was new, and that his instructions
did not inform him how to meet the altered circum-
stances. He admitted with regret that no accommoda-
tion could take place, and announced the conference at
an end. 1
There are occasions when it is not easy to reconcile
politeness with sincerity; and the American envoys
made no pretence of being credulous or pliable. A
moment arrived, in the course of the parley, which
seemed to call for an exchange of compliments. The
Admiral was by nature reserved and saturnine ; 2 but
there was one topic which lay very near his heart, and
on which he was always ready to discourse. He accord-
ingly now became profuse in expressions of gratitude
to the State of Massachusetts for erecting a monument
in Westminster Abbey to his elder brother, who had
been killed at Ticonderoga in the French war. He
esteemed, (he said,) that honour above all things in the
world ; he felt for America as for a brother ; and, if
America was overwhelmed, he should lament its ruin
like a brother's loss. Franklin bowed and smiled, and,
with a collected countenance, and some affectation of
simplicity, answered that he and his colleagues would
do their utmost endeavours to save his Lordship from
that mortification. Somewhat earlier in the colloquy
1 Besides the report made to Congress by the delegates, a clear account
of the meeting with Ix>rd Howe is given in letters from John Adams to
Samuel. Samuel Adams, now Secretary to the Massachusetts Assembly,
liked the notion of a conference as little as any one. " Your Secretary,"
John Adams wrote to President Warren, " will rip about this measure ;
and well he may." But Samuel Adams, though hot, and even red-hot,
against political opponents, was not captious in his judgements about hi*
friends. He admitted the difficulties of the American commissioners,
and heartily praised their conduct. Their sentiments and language, he
said, were becoming the character they bore ; they managed with great
dexterity; they maintained the dignity of Congress; and the indepen-
dence of America stood thenceforward on a better footing than before. So
he told John Adams, in a letter of September 30, 1776.
MValpole called the Howes "those brave, silent brothers." Last
Journals; February 1775.
266 THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
the English Commissioner had defined his position by
observing that he was not authorised to regard the
gentlemen, with whom he had the honour to find him-
self, as members of Congress, but only as private
persons and British subjects. Adams answered quickly
that he was ready to assume any personality which
would be agreeable to his Lordship except that of a
British subject ; and the Admiral thereupon turned to
Franklin and Rutledge, and remarked that Mr. Adams
was a decided character. Decided characters are apt
to get their own way. Some years afterwards, when
the Bostonian was a minister plenipotentiary at the
Court of St. James's, Lord Howe showed that he had
not forgotten the give and take of that historical con-
versation on Staten Island. "At the ball on the
Queen's birthnight," (John Adams wrote,) " I was at a
loss for the seats assigned to the foreign ambassadors
and their ladies. Fortunately meeting Lord Howe at
the door, I asked his Lordship where were the ambassa-
dors* seats. His Lordship, with his usual politeness, and
an unusual smile of good humour, pointed to the seats
and said, 'Aye; now we must turn you away among
the foreigners.' M
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CHAPTER VIII
LONG ISLAND. NEW YORK AND HAERLEM 1
The farce of negotiation had not been finally played
out before public attention was diverted to the stern
realities of war. General Howe took no part in this last
attempt at a diplomatic settlement. The junior British
Commissioner was already occupied over sharper and
more practical methods for reducing the colonies to their
allegiance. By the first of August his reinforcements be-
gan to make their appearance ; and they were pouring in,
at frequent intervals, during the three weeks that fol-
lowed. The earliest to report themselves at head-quarters
before New York were Clinton and Cornwallis from Caro-
lina. Then came the fresh regiments from England, and
two complete divisions of German auxiliaries. Sir Peter
Parker's unlucky squadron soon followed, carrying some
more Royal governors who had been ejected from their
provinces, together with a small collection of loyal Vir-
ginian militia, exhibiting every shade of colour, and known
in Whig circles by the designation of Lord Dunmore's
Own Ethiopians. 2 From Governors downwards, all were
very tired of being on ship-board. Even the Footguards,
who always had the pick of everything, and certainly
did not sail on the worst-found vessels, complained that
their food had been bad, and the water putrid. 8 The
1 This spelling was adopted by the early colonists, and was in general
use during the Revolutionary War. The American town is written as
"Haerlem" in Marshall's Life of Washington, Philadelphia, 1804; and
the city in Holland is so spelt in Dr. Watson's Philip the Second, pub-
lished in 1779.
a A computation of Howe's army, made by an American patriot in
August 1776, includes "Lord Dunmore's scrubby fleet, with negroes,
Tories, &c. — 150 men."
"Letter in a London newspaper of October I, 1776 ; British Museum.
267
268 THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
Highlanders, for their part, professed to have no inten-
tion of ever tempting the sea again, and had brought
their churns and ploughs with them, in the expectation
of settling down on the confiscated lands of the rebel
farmers. 1 Except that Staten Island did not pitch and
roll, the army for the present was not more luxuriously
circumstanced than during the voyage. The quarters
were very close for such a multitude, and there were no
provisions besides the remains of the abominable stores
with which the contractors had sparingly stocked the
transports. The situation, moreover, had become one of
moral, as well as material, discomfort. Those battalions,
which Howe brought with him from Halifax, had already
outstayed their welcome as far as the islanders were con-
cerned ; and the Hessians, on their arrival, found no wel-
come at all. For the Royal troops had already adopted
towards the civil population, irrespective of political
opinion, a behaviour which, taking the war as a whole,
did as much as anything else to render impossible either
the reconciliation, or the re-conquest, of the colonies.
" They have eaten all the cattle, and are now killing and
barrelling up all the horses they meet with. The Tories
on the island are very ill-treated lately, so that the in-
habitants, who at first were so pleasant, would now be
willing to poison them. They take everything they
choose, and no one has anything he can call his own. 1
That was the condition of Staten Island towards the
end of August. The inhabitants were eager to be rid
of the soldiers ; and the soldiers were keen to go. All
eyes were turned across the narrow channel towards the
verdant shore of Long Island, where between four and
five score thousand beeves were still grazing unslaugh-
tered, and whither the King's servants were pressingly
invited by a loyal people who had not yet learned by
experience what a military occupation meant.
If Livy had been the chronicler of that campaign,
he would have had a story to tell after his own heart ;
for the omens were
A dreadful thunder-
1 Letter from Staten Island ; August 1776.
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LONG ISLAND
269
storm broke over Washington's camp. " Three officers
were struck dead instantly ; the points of their swords
for several inches were melted, with a few silver dollars
they had in their pockets." 1 Any competent soothsayer
would have interpreted the portent as an indication that
the weapons of the Republic would be shattered in war,
and that its treasury would cease to pay in specie. The
regimental officers, however, and the common men of
the American army were in no desponding mood. The
weather was fearfully hot; but they took their duties
coolly. One general reported to Washington that he
was obliged to chase the soldiers from tree to tree, to
prevent their lounging. A commander with reasonable
foresight must have reflected that, if it was so difficult
to drive them back to their drill from beneath the shade
of the branches, it would be a still harder matter to get
them from behind the shelter of the trunks on a day of
battle. Minute-men and Continentals alike, they enjoyed
the plenty which abounded, and the fun which was con-
stantly on foot, within the city ; and contrasted their own
jovial life with the short commons, and irksome inac-
tivity, prevailing in the hostile cantonments on Staten
Island. They were vastly amused by the exulting shouts
with which the hungry British greeted the arrival of a
canoe laden with cabbages, and nailed the unaccustomed
spectacle of a live bullock being hoisted on land from on
board a barge. The wilder spirits made a pastime of
rowing themselves across the channel in order to give
Howe's people a false alarm. It was a great diversion,
(they declared,) to see the red-coats throwing away their
powder, and wasting bullets on the trees. The young
militiamen did well to snatch the delights of the passing
hour; for there were many grim months in store for
them.
The jubilant confidence, which overflowed among
the lower ranks in the American army, was not shared
by older and wiser citizens. Men of that class were
resolute, but grave and anxious. " Sir," (so one of them
1 Letter in the American Archives of August 22, 1 776.
270 THE AAfERICAX REVOLUTION
wrote to another,) " this will be the trying year. If
possible they must be hindered from getting any foot-
hold this season. If that can be done, I think the day
will be our own, and we shall be for ever delivered from
tyranny." 1 A trying year it was, and there were more
such to follow ; but people, who have an immense and
perilous task in front of them, sometimes obey a whole-
some instinct when they school themselves to look
no further than a twelvemonth ahead. As the crisis
approached, Washington, who discerned the danger
more clearly than he saw the way to meet it, was per-
turbed far beyond his wont ; but he did not dishearten
those around him by giving direct expression to his
apprehensions. Evidence of his inward trouble must
be sought in the exceptional character of the steps
which he adopted, and in the intensity of his appeals
to the patriotism of others. On the twelfth of August
six-and-thirty British vessels entered the Bay, where
near twice that number already were lying ; and next
morning Washington packed up all his documents
which bore upon politics, and sent them to Philadel-
phia, in charge of a trustworthy field-officer, to be
deposited in the custody of Congress. Four days after-
wards he desired the State authorities to take measures
for the removal of non-combatants. " When I con-
sider," he wrote, "that the city of New York will in all
human probability very soon be the scene of a bloody
conflict, I cannot but view the great numbers of
women, children, and infirm persons remaining in it,
with the most melancholy concern. When the men-of-
war passed up the river, the shrieks and cries of these
poor creatures, running every way with their children,
were truly distressing, and I fear they will have an
unhappy effect on the ears and minds of our young and
inexperienced soldiery." 2 His own receipt for pre-
paring the young and inexperienced to face danger
1 Josiah Bartlett to John tangdon of Philadelphia,
a Washington to the President of Congress, August 13, 1776 ; to the
New York Convention, August 17.
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LONG ISLAND
271
and difficulty was to tell them the truth calmly, but
forcibly and without disguise. " The hour," so he in-
formed them, " is fast approaching on which the honour
and success of this army, and the safety of our bleeding
country, will depend. Remember, officers and soldiers,
that you are freemen, fighting for the blessings of liberty ;
that slavery will be your portion, and that of your pos-
terity, if you do not acquit yourselves like men."
That was one of a series of proclamations enforc-
ing with ever increasing earnestness, and reiterating
in the minutest particulars, the duties of officer and
soldier on the eve of a battle, and in the heat of
action. It is entered in the Order-book of the twenty-
third August ; and by that time Howe was already in
Long Island. At nine in the morning of the twenty-
second, fifteen thousand men, and forty guns, were dis-
embarked within the curve of Gravesend Bay, six
or seven miles to the south of Brooklyn. English and
Highlanders were the first on shore; and then Count
Von Donop's Jagers and Grenadiers were ferried across
in large flat-boats, with muskets sloped and in column of
march ; preserving the well-considered pomp of German
discipline on that salt water which few of them had ever
smelt until they attained manhood. The British lines
were soon thronged by country-people wearing badges
of loyalty; cattle and sheep were driven in from the
morasses and thickets ; supplies of every description
reappeared from their hiding-places in great abundance ;
and, very shortly afterwards, two more brigades of
Hessians, under General von Heister, came over to
Gravesend Bay, and raised the numbers of the invaders,
present on Long Island, to twenty thousand rank and
file. The American Commander-in-Chief, misinformed
by his scouts, under-rated the host that General Howe
had taken with him, and over-estimated the detachment
which was left behind on Staten Island, and which was
therefore disposable for a direct assault upon the city
of New York. The incurable faultiness of the situation,
in which Washington had allowed himself to be placed,
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272 THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
was now painfully visible. He was under the necessity
of keeping the halves of his own inferior force separated
from each other by an arm of the sea, which the British
fleet might at any moment render impassable for his
rafts and barges ; while Howe, by the aid of that fleet,
could throw the whole of his superior strength on any
point along the extensive coast-line which encircled the
American position. Washington informed President
Hancock that he had been unable to send more than
six additional battalions to the camp on Long Island,
because the British fleet might move up with the re-
mainder of their army, and make an attack on New
York at the next flood-tide. The troops, (he said,)
went off in high good humour ; and those on the spot
discovered great cheerfulness, and an excellent temper. 1
The colonists had need of all the gaiety which they
could muster; for the American garrison of Long
Island, even after it had been reinforced, did not ex-
ceed eight thousand men.
The views of both the opposed generals were
coloured, and their tactics governed, by recollections
of Bunker's Hill. Howe moved cautiously, and in
overwhelming force, with the intention of first driving
the Americans within the lines of Brooklyn, and then
besieging those lines deliberately and systematically, as
if they were the ramparts of a fortified town. Wash-
ington, on the other hand, was not without an expecta-
tion that the enemy, — remembering their victory of the
preceding year, and forgetting the price which it had
cost them, — would march against his breastworks in
uncovered line of battle ; and that his own people
would have the opportunity of fighting under circum-
stances which made them the equals of any soldiers in
the world. The British army would then be exposed
to the probability of a sanguinary repulse, which would
go far to disgust the British nation with the war and
its authors. Daniel Webster has related how, when
1 Washington to the President of Congress ; New York, August 23,
1776.
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LONG ISLAND
273
the first tidings of Bunker's Hill reached Philadelphia,
Colonel Washington made careful enquiry about the
behaviour of the New England militia. On hearing
that they had reserved their fire until the advancing
column was within eight rods, and then had delivered it
with fearful effect, he pronounced that in that case the
liberties of the country were safe. 1 And now, hoping
against hope, General Washington made arrangements
for securing that the scene on the heights above
Charlestown should be repeated at Brooklyn on a
larger scale ; and with this difference, that the intrench-
ments would remain in American hands after the
slaughter was over. The Order-book testifies to the
pains which he expended over his preparations for this
result. Brigadiers were directed to measure out a
certain space in front of each several redoubt, and to
make sure that the enemy had stepped within the fatal
limit before ever an American musket was discharged.
Piles of brushwood were to be laid along the line of
demarcation, so as to render it distinct and familiar to
the marksmen behind the bulwark. The captains were to
see that bullets fitted the bore, that flints were properly
fixed, and that cartridges were dealt out in equal
parcels, with each man's name written legibly on his
bundle; and privates were especially enjoined to be
attentive and silent, lest they should miss or mistake
the order to fire, when at last that order came.
Whether or not the race is to the swift, Washington
had long ago been taught, both by triumph and defeat,
that in the days of fire-arms the fight is always to the
cool.
Nothing could be better planned than Washington's
scheme of battle ; but with troops like his, at this early
stage of the war, he should himself have been on the
1 Daniel Webster spoke twice on Bunker's Hill ; —-first in 1825, when
Lafayette laid the corner-stone of the Monument, and again in 1843, when
the Monument was finished. It was on the latter occasion that the story
<|Uoted in the text was told to a crowd of a hundred thousand persons,
including eleven veterans who had fought in the battle.
it. 11.— Vol. 1. t
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274 THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
spot to see that his conceptions were carried into effect.
He could not, however, any more than his army, be in
two places at once. The proper post for a Commander-
in-Chief, whose personal courage was above dispute, —
and whose responsibilities extended over all the forces
of the State, and over a theatre of war which covered
six thousand square leagues, — was in his opinion at New
York. He therefore maintained his head-quarters, where
he had planted them, on the mainland, and in a great
city whence it was easy to establish communications
with all parts of the continent. As the plot thickened,
however, he went over daily to the scene of action ;
where, even in his absence, it cannot be said that there
was any scarcity of officers. Indeed, the Americans on
Long Island suffered from being over-generalled. Their
story, during that eventful week, reads like one of those
campaigns in ancient Greece where a different com-
mander, in a group of several, directed the operations
on each day in turn. Until a very short time before
the storm of war burst upon the island, Nathanael
Greene had been in charge; and a better substitute
for George Washington it would have been hard to
find. Knox, the American general of artillery, whose
praise was well worth having, has described Greene's
soldiership as intuitive. 11 He came to us the rawest and
the most untutored being I ever met with : but in less
than twelve months he was equal, in military knowledge,
to any General Officer in the army, and very superior to
most of them." 1
Those twelve months had now elapsed ; but they had
been a period of strain, hardship, and exposure to many,
and to Greene even more than others. On the fifteenth
of August he reported himself in bed with a raging
fever; although he hoped, by the assistance of Provi-
dence, to be on horseback again before the enemy
landed. But either he had broken down more com-
pletely than he thought, or the British came sooner
than he expected ; for Washington found it necessary
1 Garden's Revolutionary Anecdotes; Vol. I., page 65.
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LONG ISLAND
2/5
to inform Congress that General Greene had been ex-
tremely ill, and still " continued bad " ; and that he had
therefore been obliged to appoint Major General Sulli-
van to command on the island. So Washington wrote
on the twenty-third of August; and within forty-eight
hours Sullivan had been superseded by Israel Putnam.
Though now a full Major General of the Continental
army, Putnam was the same shrewd, genial, New Eng-
land uncle as ever ; perfectly ready to die for his coun-
try, but regarding life as a great joke so long as it
lasted. A few days back he had been engaged in
assisting the State authorities to remove women and
children from the city of New York to a place of
security. In the course of that operation he despatched
to a friend at a distance what he apparently meant for
an official letter. General Putnam sent him, (so the
communication was worded,) his daughter. If he did
not like her, he might send her back again ; and she
would be taken good care of, and provided with a Whig
husband/ The veteran was only too well fitted for
infusing an extra dose of hopefulness and enthusiasm
into soldiers who, just then, would have been none the
worse for a little self-distrust; but he did not possess
either the training, or the temperament, indispensable
for the leader of a regular army. A day after he
assumed command, he had to endure something very
like a severe scolding. It was with no small concern,
(Washington wrote,) that he had listened to a scatter-
ing, unmeaning fusillade from the American lines.
That unsoldierlike and disorderly practice wasted am-
munition ; frightened away any British or Germans who
might be in the mind to desert ; and removed all proba-
bility of distinguishing between a real, and a false,
alarm. Good tactics consisted in keeping the main
force alert, and in hand, behind the intrenchments ; in
sending forward strong, well-led skirmishing parties for
the purpose of harassing the adversary ; in laying traps
1 General Putnam to Major Moncrieffe. Historical Manuscripts;
Fourteenth Report, Appendix, Part x.
T2
2?6 THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
and ambuscades for his foragers; and, above all, in
accustoming the young troops to fatigue and danger,
and supplying them with the honestly earned, and
therefore valuable, self-confidence which arises from
an experience of success.
That system of tactics, in the process of time, Wash-
ington made, as it were, his own ; — the true Fabian
policy, on which his fame as a captain largely, and
indeed mainly, rests. But Putnam did not catch the
idea when it was first presented; and the British left
him very little time to think it out. The old champion
of the Indian border construed his instructions into a
permission to have a battle royal in any position, and
against any odds. Washington spent the whole of the
twenty-sixth of August on Long Island, and made his
dispositions with the object of securing that the advance
of the British should be slow and arduous, and that the
defenders of Brooklyn should not be attacked unawares.
A range of densely wooded heights lay all along the
front of the American position, distant from it about
two miles at the nearest point. Towards the British
left, in the neighbourhood of the sea, that range was
traversed by a highway from Gravesend Bay. Four
miles to the east two waggon roads, in close proximity
to each other, climbed from the hamlet of Flatbush,
over steep and broken ground, into the centre of the
American lines. And again three miles in the same
direction, far away on Putnam's left, a fourth road
crossed the ridge, and conducted the traveller into an
excellent causeway leading to Brooklyn, through Bed-
ford, from the village of Jamaica. 1 Washington sta-
tioned infantry in each of the three defiles on his own
right and centre ; and historians affirm that he gave
orders to watch the Jamaica road, and that those orders
were neglected. So it has been affirmed, but not by
him ; for in this matter, as in all others, those who wish
to hear what George Washington has to say in his own
1 All these roads are clearly marked on the map at the end of the
volume.
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LONG ISLAND
defence must wait until the day of Judgement. At
nightfall, when he went back to New York from Long
Island, the American Commander-in-Chief left the west-
ern approaches to Brooklyn covered by twenty-five hun-
dred men. The rest of his troops slept on their arms
within the fortifications, having been carefully drilled
and indoctrinated to meet an assault which, after the
precautions he had taken, could not come upon them as
a surprise.
At nine o'clock that evening Howe began to move.
He did not despise his adversary ; and indeed, until
close upon the very end of that protracted campaign,
he never erred except from superabundant and un-
timely caution. His main body, accompanied by a very
powerful artillery, 1 advanced on the extreme right from
the village of Flatland. Clinton, who led the van, halted
two hours before daybreak at the foot of the pass, half
a mile short of the junction with the Jamaica road. Be-
hind him stood Lord Cornwallis and Lord Percy ; while
the long column was closed by the forty-ninth regiment,
escorting a battery of heavy guns. General von Heister
held the three brigades of Germans, deployed in a line
nearly a mile in length, within cannon-shot of the two
central passes. General Grant, meanwhile, with two bri-
gades of English, and the Forty -second Highlanders,
marched forward by the coast road. There was no weak
man among the commanders, who had all served in
famous wars ; and the affair went like clock-work. At
midnight Grant assailed the American pickets, with a
tremendous noise, and an ostentatious display of energy
so regulated as not to carry him an inch further north-
ward than his orders warranted. Howe's purpose was
twofold ; — to distract the attention of the American
general from the peril which threatened his left flank ;
and to induce him, by the temptation of beating Grant,
to send a large portion of his army so far to the front
that it could almost certainly be enveloped and destroyed.
1 According to Lord Howe's despatch, there were twenty-eight pieces
of artillery with the right-hand column.
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278 THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
The snare was deftly baited ; and it caught Putnam.
At three in the morning of the twenty-seventh of August
he heard that his outposts on the coast road had been
driven in; and he thereupon directed Lord Stirling,
with the first troops on whom he could lay his hand,
" to advance beyond the lines and repulse the enemy."
Shortly afterwards Putnam was informed that cavalry
and infantry were in motion just south of the Jamaica
highway. The neglect to provide themselves with
mounted scouts was now disastrous to the Americans.
Half a troop of light dragoons, under the charge of a
brisk partisan, would have supplied Putnam with specific
information of a character to sober even that boisterous
warrior. No commander in his senses would have know-
ingly and deliberately commenced a general action when
he himself had not a left wing, and when the enemy's
right wing was more than twice the size of that part of
his own army which was present in the battle. But the
news from the eastward, in the shape in which it reached
Putnam, failed to alarm him. He did not recall Stirling ;
he did not think it worth his while to advertise Washing-
ton ; and the only step he took was that of sending
Sullivan, with a minute reinforcement, to assume the
command of the weak New England regiments which
faced an enormously superior number of Germans on
the central roads. The Americans were scattered
through the woods, as sheep that had too many shep-
herds. They were, in all, somewhere between four and
five thousand, and they had six pieces of cannon as
against forty. Man to man, their chance would have
been a poor one ; and, when contending in a proportion
of one to four, they had no chance whatever.
The sun, (as Americans remembered it after the events
on which it shone became matter of history, ) rose with a
red and angry glare. Clinton, who headed the British
advance on the right, had no one to oppose him. He
reached the meeting of the two highways, wheeled to
the westward, and pushed vigorously along the Jamaica
road. Between eight and nine in the morning he was
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LONG ISLAND
279
at Bedford, in great force ; and he at once assailed Sulli-
van's Americans in flank and rear. Against their front
the Hessians advanced two deep, with colours flying,
and to the music of drums and hautboys, as if they were
marching across the Friedrichs Platz at Cassel on the
Landgrave's birthday. They did not fire a shot, but
pressed steadily forward until they could employ their
bayonets. Sullivan did neither worse nor better than
any ordinary, or perhaps any extraordinary, officer would
do in such a hopeless predicament. He cannot be blamed
for the plight in which he found himself ; for it was the
business of the general in charge of the whole army,
who had placed him where he stood, to provide against
his being surrounded. Intercepted between Clinton and
von Heister, the Americans made no resistance worth
the name. Sullivan kept together some of his people,
and showed fight for a while ; but the show must have
been a poor one, for only two Hessians were killed.
When the case was desperate he told his remaining
soldiers, or as many as could hear him, to shift for them-
selves ; and the greater part of their comrades had already
anticipated his orders. One regiment, at least, had been
withdrawn by its colonel soon enough for safety, and
rather too soon for glory ; the men of other battalions
broke their formation, and hid themselves in the bushes
or maize fields until they could regain the American
lines under cover of night; but Sullivan himself had
stayed too long under fire, and he was taken prisoner,
together with some hundreds of his followers.
On the English left, General Grant attacked at day-
break; first with artillery; and then, (as an approach-
ing tumult from the northeast showed that the enemy
opposite to him were well within the net,) he sent for-
ward his skirmishers, and, after a due interval, thrust
the main body of his infantry into close action. The
Americans in that quarter displayed no backwardness
to meet him. Lord Stirling had brought from camp an
excellent Delaware battalion, and another which was re-
cruited from the families of men of property in and
280 THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
about Baltimore. These were the young Mary landers
who had paid so little deference to the homely New
England generals, and who now were well content to
serve under one who passed for a British nobleman, and
who possessed qualities which did not derogate from
the title. The ranks of both regiments were full, their
uniforms smart, their weapons the best that money could
purchase, and their courage high. Stirling himself, then
and afterwards, was a hearty fighter ; but he had much
to learn, or rather to unlearn, for he was not yet eman-
cipated from a pedantic reverence for the drill-book.
Colonel Reed, the American Adjutant General, com-
mented on his action as follows in a spirit of respectful
criticism. " My Lord, who loved discipline, made a
mistake which probably affected us a great deal. He
would not suffer his regiments to break, but kept them
in lines and on open ground. The enemy, on the other
hand, possessed themselves of the woods and fences.
His personal bravery was conspicuous." In these bat-
tles, where the numbers engaged were exceedingly
small as compared with the issues which were staked
upon the event, the personal bravery of a commander
went for very much indeed; and Grant and Stirling
made themselves felt all along their respective lines of
battle. Encouraged by their example, both parties so
comported themselves that each paid the other an un-
studied and unintended compliment by greatly over-
rating the force of their adversaries. The English
subsequently confessed that objects seen through the
medium of smoke and fire are always magnified, and
that their own people reckoned the Provincials at three
times the real figure; and Washington's Adjutant Gen-
eral claimed that the Americans on the right wing,
whatever they lost, had preserved their honour, since
the enemy were as ten to one.
So much tenacity was shown on both sides that there
was no need of exaggeration. The British men-of-war
had attempted to advance by sea on a course parallel
to Grant's line of march; but wind, and afterwards
LONG ISLAND
tide, were against them, and they could not beat up the
Bay. The struggle on land was so severe that the
English at one time had expended their ammunition,
and were halted near the edge of the forest. Admiral
Howe, powerless on his own element, and glad to be of
what use he could, rowed on shore with a supply of
ammunition, and sent his boat's crew up the hill laden
with sacks of cartridges. It was a fierce and even
combat; but the decision was being worked out else-
where. Stirling, before ever he knew, was involved in
an entanglement from which neither valour nor con-
duct could extricate him without immense loss. Two
miles to his rear ran Gowan's Creek, a sea-water in-
let bordered on north and south by a broad and deep
marsh. The only passage across the obstacle was a
bridge commanded by the buildings of a mill, the ma-
chinery of which was impelled by the tide that flowed
up and down the estuary. That bridge had been burned
by a Connecticut colonel, who had made a premature
retreat from his station in the centre, and who, (so long
as his own command escaped intact,) cared little what
might befall the hindmost. And now Lord Cornwallis,
passing round the rear of Clinton, marched a regiment
of Highlanders, and another of Grenadiers, to the
neighbourhood of the ruined bridge, and strongly oc-
cupied a defile which would have been almost impassable
even if it had been left undefended.
When Stirling became aware that his communications
were cut he issued the word to retire, and his troops
withdrew in perfect order. He might well have been
excused if he had given up all for lost; but he was
fully determined that something considerable should
be saved. He could rely upon his soldiers to second
his intentions; because on this, as on similar occasions
throughout the war, men of English blood in both the
contending armies evinced great unwillingness to sur-
render. Stirling directed the main body of his people
to struggle through the mire and the water as best
they could; while he himself, with one wing of the
382 Tht. AMERICAN REVOLUTION
Maryland regiment, remained behind to confront
Cornwallis. Seven of the retreating Americans were
drowned ; but the rest got safe across, and carried with
them a score of British prisoners. Stirling kept up a
long and very spirited struggle; but he was encircled
on every quarter. Cornwallis had not been slow to
accept his challenge ; Grant had followed him up from
the southward ; while Clinton and the Hessians, having
finished their own business in the centre, marched
promptly in the direction of the firing. The five com-
panies from Baltimore were wiped off the rolls. The
ground was thickly strewn with their buff and scarlet ;
and the survivors, all but nine, were captured. Stirling
gave up his sword to General von Heister; whose
presence on the spot testified both to the admirable
skill with which Howe had brought his right wing to
bear on all the critical stages of the battle in succes-
sion, and to the heroism of those young Marylanders
who had held their ground until the entire hostile army
was assembled to overwhelm them.
The loss of Americans in killed and wounded was
variously estimated, and has never been ascertained.
Washington reported it at a very few hundreds ; though
he gave no details, and admitted that he had not been
able to obtain a precise account. General Howe com-
puted that more than two thousand of the enemy had
been killed, wounded, drowned, and suffocated in the
marsh ; but in the same paragraph of his despatch he
put their number engaged at ten thousand, which was
more than double the real amount. Howe was a poor
hand at figures. During the earlier part of his career
he had been accustomed to charge straight at the
enemy without stopping to count them ; and, as a gen-
eral in chief command, he counted them wrong. Not
a dozen Americans were drowned in the creek; and
the country-bred militiamen picked their way through
the bog without being suffocated. 1 It is hard to be-
1 Colonel Haslet, who commanded the Delawares, and brought them
back across the creek, saw only one man drowned.
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LONG ISLAND
283
lieve that, exclusive of prisoners, they can have lost
anywhere near a thousand. According to Howe's own
statement, less than seventy of their wounded were left
behind on the field ; and yet those of them who had
been badly hurt must all have been there. A great
Anglo-Indian proconsul, who had witnessed as much
war as most civilians, was in the habit of remarking
that he had never been present at an affair where the
victors were not firmly persuaded that their opponents
had carried off the greater part of their dead and dying. 1
That was asserted, and believed, on many occasions by
both parties in the Revolutionary War ; but the Ameri-
cans who retired from the fight on Long Island had
enough to do in carrying off themselves.
All which can be said for certain is that more Pro-
vincials would have been hit if more of the British had
shot straight. Our people had behaved to perfection.
Howe's plan was worthy of Frederic the Great ; and the
execution of it, — in accuracy, punctuality, and dash, —
could not easily have been bettered by Frederic's army.
It had been a performance, on a smaller scale, almost as
artistic to a military eye as the manoeuvres by which the
King of Prussia rolled up the Austrian line at Leuthen ;
and yet some of Stirling's officers, who kept their heads
in the mtUe, observed that the fire of the British was
less deadly than their discipline was exact, and their on-
set determined. 2 Three hundred of Howe's own troops
1 Lord Lawrence told the author this, more than once ; and no one
who knew the worth of words ever forgot what he had even once heard
Lord Lawrence say.
2 "The Major, Captain Ramsey, and Lieutenant Plunket were fore-
most, and within forty yards of the enemy's muzzles. The enemy were
chiefly under cover of an orchard, save a few that showed themselves and
pretended to give up, clubbing their firelocks till we came within that
distance, when they immediately presented and blazed in our faces. They
entirely overshot us, and killed some men away behind in our rear. I
was so near that I could not miss. I discharged my rifle seven times
that day as deliberately as I ever did at a mark, and with as little perturba-
tion." That passage occurs in an American letter of the thirty-first of
August. Colonel Attlee, who was with Stirling at Long Island, wrote
that, if Grant's soldiers had been marksmen, they must have cut off the
greater part of his detachment.
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284 THE AAfERJCAN REVOLUTION
were killed or wounded, and a handful captured. Stir-
ling and Sullivan, between them, had six guns in action,
and lost them all. The British took prisoners near
eleven hundred of the enemy, including three generals, 1
and, (as was to be expected when an American army had
met with a disaster,) an exceptionally large proportion
of colonels.
Washington came over to Long Island too late to
prevent the battle, but in time to mitigate the severity
of its consequences. When Howe directed a strong
column against the Brooklyn lines, — on the chance of
carrying them by a rush amidst the confusion and dis-
may which at such a moment might beset the garrison,
— he found the American Commander-in-Chief already
there, with three fresh regiments from across the water ;
and, after a few rounds had been discharged, the British
retired. At another period of the morning Washington
was on the west front of the fortifications, sending
troops to protect and assist the remains of his right
wing during their passage through Gowan's Creek, and
witnessing the self-sacrifice of the Marylanders with
emotion the outward signs of which he is described as
having been unable to repress. He had need of all his
self-command ; for there was little comfort to be drawn
from the sights around him, or from the prospect which
was before him. His militiamen, who required the en-
couragement of an early success in order even to begin
their conversion into real soldiers, had been flung into
action against a regular army so numerous, and so ad-
mirably handled, that it would have been able to give a
good account of twice, or perhaps even three times, their
number of European veterans. They had no food except
biscuits, and some meat which they could not cook ; for
on the morrow the weather broke. Rain fell continu-
ously ; the men in the trenches were up to their waists
1 Besides Sullivan and Stirling, General Woodhull was captured at
Jamaica after the action, and died of wounds received under circumstances
not very clearly recorded. In Howe's report, which has heen followed by
some English historians, he is misnamed " General Odcll."
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LONG ISLAND 285
in water; their cartridges were sodden, and most of
their fire-arms useless. For in those days of flint-locks
the effect of very heavy rain was to put military science
four centuries back, by reducing good musketeers to the
condition of indifferent spearmen ; 1 and the Americans
were in worse case still, because some of their regiments
were not even provided with bayonets. Several bat-
talions had left their blankets far away in the woods, at
the bivouacs which they occupied on the night preced-
ing the battle. Nine thousand disheartened soldiers, the
last hope of their country, were penned up with the sea
behind them, and a triumphant enemy in front ; shelter-
less and famished on a square mile of open ground
swept by a fierce and cold northeasterly gale.
That disagreeable circumstance was the salvation of
the Republic. Towards the close of August, in those
regions, the prevailing wind was from the southwest;
and, whenever it once more blew from that usual quar-
ter, all would be over with the American army, and, in
all probability, with the American cause as well. Dur-
ing the engagement on Long Island one of Lord Howe's
vessels, which had contrived to get within range of the
battery at Redhook, speedily dismounted the guns and
wrecked the earthworks. Such had been the execution
done by a single man-of-war, and that none of the larg-
est. Washington could have no illusions as to what
1 Till percussion caps came into use, no improvement in the weapon
could obviate this drawback. At the battle of Dresden, in August 1S13,
Murat's cuirassiers cut down and captured great masses of Austrian infan-
try whose muskets would not go off on account of the wet ; and on the
previous day Blucher's cavalry, largely from the tame cause, had ruined
Marshal Macdonald's army on the Katzbach.
The British soldiers in America, — fine fellows that they were, — prayed
for the sort of weather which would enable them to come to close quarters
with their adversary. An English officer, who was in Burgoyne's expedi-
tion, wrote thus of the army when on the way to Saratoga. " The heavy
rain afforded another consolation to the men during the march, which
was, in case the enemy had attacked us, that the fate of the day would
have rested solely upon the bayonet. This idea prevailed so strongly in
the minds of the men that, notwithstanding they were acquainted with the
superiority of the enemy, an attack seemed to be the wish of every
soldier."
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286 THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
would be his fate when the whole British fleet lay in the
Kast River, shelling New York ; searching every corner
of his position on Long Island with thirty-two pound
cannon-balls ; and rendering the provisioning and rein-
forcement of his troops hopeless, and their retreat im-
practicable. Even before the English Admiral could
bring his guns to bear, the situation of the beleaguered
Provincials was to a high degree precarious. There
was a belief in both camps that, if Howe's infantry had
been led to the assault, they would have walked over
the intrenchments behind which the beaten army was
now gathered. 1 If that supposition was correct, the
minute-men, who defended the redoubt upon Bunker's
Hill, saved the American lines on Long Island. Their
courage, and the precision of their fire, in the battle of
the preceding year, had made such an impression upon
Howe's memory that on this occasion he declined to
repeat the experiment of a general assault across open
ground. His sappers drew the first parallel at a distance
of six hundred yards from the hostile ramparts, and his
engineers proceeded to mark out sites for breaching
batteries. His methods were slow, but as certain in
their operation as the laws of nature. When once the
wind changed, and the leading British frigates had
passed within Governor Island and taken Brooklyn in
the rear, the independence of the United States would
have been indefinitely postponed ; and, whenever they
became a nation, their capital would have been called by
another name.
But the end was not yet ; and, if it did not come now,
it might come never. Washington allowed himself forty-
l4< Could wc have trusted our spies* account," ("an English officer
wrote,) M a terrible slaughter might have been made. But the General
appears to have been very wary." That opinion was held by some intel-
ligent Americans inside the lines. " On the morning after our first night's
watch, Colonel Shee took me aside, and asked me what I thought of our
situation. I could not but say that I thought it a very discouraging one.
He viewed it in the same light, and added that, if we were not soon with-
drawn from it, we should inevitably be cut to pieces." Ptnnsylvanian
Memoirs; chapter vi.
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LONG ISLAND
287
eight hours within which to make his preparations; and of
those hours he spent none in sleep, nor wasted any in
tentative and misdirected efforts. His first care was to
cheer up the disconsolate people around him. He sent
to King's Bridge, sixteen miles above New York, for
two Pennsylvanian regiments, which, (to use his own
expression,) had been trained with more than common
attention. In the forenoon of the twenty-eighth of Au-
gust they marched up from the landing-place, gaily and
expensively dressed, with heads erect and shoulders
squared, and a bayonet at the end of every barrel ;
while the spectators, proud to be the comrades of such
a gallant company, were overheard saying that those
were " the lads who might do something." With them
arrived Colonel Glover's regiment of Massachusetts fish-
ermen who, — although they had been deprived of their
livelihood under that Statute against the passing of
which Charles Fox vainly protested, 1 — were soon to
make it evident that nautical skill and hardihood could
not be extinguished by Act of Parliament. Throughout
the morning the sky was gloomy, and with the after-
noon rain came ; but all that day, and all the next, the
American General, ordinarily so frugal of powder, en-
couraged those of his riflemen, who could keep their
priming-pans dry, to exchange shots with the enemy's
firing parties. The crackle of musketry, which ran
along the parapet, held the besiegers in respect, and did
something to restore and maintain the confidence of the
Provincials. Taking into his secret one or two officers
of high rank and tried discretion, Washington trans-
mitted orders to New York, and up the estuaries on
either flank of the Manhattan peninsula ; and the pre-
cautions which he observed were so stringent that not
even his aides-de-camp knew his purpose. General
Heath, who commanded at King's Bridge, — and the
Assistant Quarter Master General, who was stationed
in the city, — were commissioned to impress every kind
1 An Act for Restraining the Trade and Commerce of the New England
Colonies. The American Revolution ; Part I., chapter vii.
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2$8 THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
of water-craft which had either oars or sails, and which
could be kept afloat, and to have them all in the mouth
of the East River by dark on the evening of the twenty-
ninth. Then, and not till then, Washington assembled
what was as near to a Council of War as a commander
who had self-respect, and an opinion of his own, would
permit himself to convene. When his generals had
heard all that he had to tell them, they unanimously
resolved to withdraw the army, and they put on paper
a catalogue of most convincing reasons in favour of that
course. The evacuation of Long Island, (so they stated,)
was unavoidable, because the woods which covered the
position had been occupied by the British ; because the
soldiers had no roof over their heads, and the rain had
spoiled their ammunition ; because the lines were weak in
places, and the garrison was insufficient to guard them ;
because the enemy were bringing round ships to cut off
their retreat ; — in short, and in fact, because, if they
were ever to get away at all, it was the utmost they could
do to get away now.
Washington had to solve the problem of preparing
his army for a rearward march without giving any inti-
mation of his actual project. At dark on the twenty-
ninth of August his colonels were ordered to get their
regiments under arms for a night attack upon the
enemy ; and good, rather than harm, would have re-
sulted if that tale had been carried across to the British
outposts. Secrets, as the Commander-in-Chief more
than suspected, were ill-kept in those easy-going ranks ;
and soldiers, who had money to leave, were soon
engaged in explaining to each other what, in case of
accident, they wished to be their testamentary disposi-
tions. When the troops had fallen in, to the surprise of
all concerned the embarkation commenced. The wind
was adverse. The sailing-vessels made very little way,
and the rowing-boats were few, and in constant danger
of being swamped ; but the mariners from Gloucester and
Marblehead had navigated stormier seas ; and not a
few of them, it is to be feared, had often plied theif
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289
oars, even in time of peace, under circumstances which
imperatively demanded both expedition and secrecy.
Before midnight the northeast gale, after having
raged for three days, died away ; a breeze sprang up
from the right quarter ; and, while air enough was
stirring to fill the canvas, the surface of the channel
became so smooth that the very smallest pinnace could
be loaded to the gunwale. There was some crowding
and hustling in the neighbourhood of the ferry. A throng
of militiamen, conscious that the bayonets of a regular
army might at any moment be at their backs, could not
be expected to wait their turn as placidly and courte-
ously as a string of fashionable ladies and gentlemen
filing up the gangway of the Calais packet. 1 Those
Americans, however, who were told off for special
duties obeyed their orders with composure. General
Mifflin undertook to hold the intrenchments with some
picked regiments, until the less disciplined portion of
the force was in safety ; and he kept with him the
Pennsylvanians, the Delawares, and all that remained
of the Marylanders. These troops, in consequence of a
mistake which never was explained, were withdrawn
prematurely from the front, and marched down in the
direction of the boats. They were met by Washington
in person ; and at his bidding they wheeled round into
the darkness, and were back at their posts before their
absence had been discovered by the enemy. The pick-
axes and shovels of the British working parties were
distinctly audible in the American lines ; but the
besiegers either did not notice any suspicious sounds,
or failed to detect their meaning.
Heaven, to all appearance, was bent on helping
that side which tried the hardest to help itself. As day
1 Washington himself acknowledged that " matters were in much confu-
sion at the ferry ; " — confusion which seemed worse confounded to
observers not in sympathy with the American cause. The crowd was so
great, according to a Tory authority, that it was impossible to get within
a quarter of a mile of the stairs. The rebels in the rear were mounting
on the shoulders, and clambering over the heads, of those before them.
ft. 11. — vol. 1. u
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THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
approached, a thick fog enshrouded the two camps, the
village of Brooklyn, and the East River up to the very
quays of New York, but not a yard beyond; for the
city itself was in sunshine. About six in the morning
Washington, — who, weary of the saddle, had been
standing on the water-steps while his rear-guard took
their places on the thwarts, — was the last man to step
on board ; and the mist cleared in time for watchers on
the northern point of Long Island to see his boat, and
two others, still only half-way through their journey to
the shore of refuge. Seldom had a retreating army
made a cleaner sweep of its own property. Howe
captured three stragglers who had stayed behind to
plunder. There fell into his hands likewise a train of
waggons ; and a few ancient cannon of the description
which insurgents eagerly seize upon at the outbreak of
a revolution, but of which, when serious fighting has
begun, the artillerymen who work them are only too
thankful to be quit. When the English at last be-
thought themselves of going to see why there was no
noise or movement behind the hostile breastworks, they
found that everything of military value had been re-
moved, — field-guns and horses ; ordnance stores ; and
even the biscuits which had not been, and the raw pork
which could not be, eaten. The provisions, indeed,
were no great loss ; but privates in the Provincial army
exultingly declared that the British soldiers, however
hard they might look, would be unable to discover a
single drink of rum.
The renown of this historical achievement owes
nothing to the vanity of its author. Washington con-
tented himself with informing Congress that the retreat
had been effected with no loss of men or ammunition,
and in as good order as could reasonably have been
anticipated. He and all his aides-de-camp, (as he
begged the president to believe,) were too weary to write
at any great length. 1 Still less was to be learned from
1 " The extreme fatigue," he said, " which myself and family have under-
gone rendered me, and them, entirely unlit to take pen in hand. Since
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LONG ISLAND
291
the report which Howe drew up for the information of
the Ministry in England. When his despatch appeared
in print, the battle of Long Island was related, as it had
been fought, in three long and serried columns; while
the withdrawal to the mainland of the American army
occupied barely the half of one brief and colourless para-
graph. 1 In that century war news was kept in store at
head-quarters until a large batch had been collected ; the
events of several weeks were compressed into a single
letter ; and it was easy for a general in command, when
at last the packet sailed, to compound a narrative of his
successes and failures in such judicious proportions as
would gratify and reassure his countrymen at home.
Horace Walpole, the least credulous of readers, acknowl-
edged rather sulkily that it was a splendid Gazette.
The frantic presumption, (he said,) which the tidings
had aroused in Court circles, seriously endangered the
relations between Great Britain and France. 2
On the Continent of Europe the friends of Congress
were dejected, and those of England " in a frenzy of
joy ; " 3 but public opinion in America, which was nearer
the spot, very soon disentangled the various elements of
the story, and recognised that the escape of the Provin-
cial army was not second in importance to the conflict
by which it had been preceded. The Committee of Secret
Correspondence at Philadelphia informed their agent in
Paris that both Whigs and Tories agreed in their admi-
ration of General Washington's performance. 4 Greene,
who knew every inch of the ground, — whose military
Monday, scarcely any of us have been out of the lines till our passage
across the East Kiver was effected yesterday morning ; and, for forty -eight
hours preceding that, I had hardly been off my horse, and never closed my
eyes."
1 Gentleman's Magazine for October 1776. The volumes of the Maga-
zine, used for this history, belonged to one who knew the truth about Long
Island ; for they contain the book-plate of Marquis Cornwallis. The set
was purchased by Macaulay, so that the well-thumbed pages have never
passed out of Whig hands.
2 Walpole's letters of October 13 and 31, 1776.
■ Wharton's Diplomatic Correspondence ; Vol. II., page 185.
292 THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
judgement was excellent, and whose favourite study had
always been military history, — pronounced that, con-
sidering the difficulties, the retreat from Long Island
was the best effected retreat he ever read or heard of.
The relief and gratitude of the Revolutionary party were
expressed in a contemporary effusion which has been
preserved among the national records. To transport,
(so this document ran,) across a wide channel of salt
water a great multitude of troops, with all their baggage,
military stores, and cannon, from out of the enemy's
mouth, in a short summer night, — " without even those
who were retreating knowing anything of the matter till
just before they were embarked, — required the conduct,
the vigilance, the generalship of a Washington ; and, if
Fame does not clarion his praise for it, she is not impar-
tial." 1 Fame, in the United States of America, seldom
falls short of her duty ; and it may be doubted whether
any great national deliverance, since the passage of the
Red Sea, has ever been more loudly acclaimed, or more
adequately celebrated, than the master-stroke of energy,
dexterity, and caution by which Washington rescued his
array and his country.
According to an old Turkish proverb, — which refers
to an illusion not confined to Turkish anglers, — every
fish that escapes appears larger than it really is. It was
believed by English staff-officers that Washington had
got away with fifteen thousand men, and that at least
twice that number of Americans were now assembled
on the Manhattan peninsula. This belief seems to have
influenced Howe's strategy, or rather his absence of
strategy, during the golden hours and weeks which
immediately followed his success on Long Island ; but
that is all matter of conjecture, for posterity has not
been admitted to his counsels. Three years subsequently,
when he had returned to England a failure, — after he
once more took his seat at Westminster, and before the
constituents, who complained of his having deceived
1 American Archives; September 1776.
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NEW YORK AND HA EE LEA/ 293
them, got an opportunity of displacing him, 1 — he en-
joyed the melancholy privilege of defending his gen-
eralship in Parliament. On the twenty-second of April,
1779, in a long speech delivered to a Committee of the
whole House, he fought his battles over again ; and,
(which was a harder task,) he gave his reasons for hav-
ing more than once abstained from fighting when vic-
tory was all but certain. He dwelt in voluminous detail
on the successive military problems which he had to en-
counter between the autumn of 1775, when he took over
the command from Gage, and the spring of 1778, when
he was replaced by Sir Henry Clinton ; but he slurred
over the cardinal question of his inaction during the first
fortnight of September 1776 in one meagre, and far from
convincing, sentence. 3 It is equally difficult to explain
satisfactorily why Howe was so long about landing on
New York Island, and why Washington was so slow in
evacuating the city. As an error, — palpable, and from
a tactical point of view quite indefensible, — one mistake
may be set against the other; but the American com-
mander had an excuse which was wanting to his oppo-
nent. Howe was bound to advise with no one except a
brother who was as little likely to be a clog on spirited
and aggressive action as any naval colleague that British
general ever had ; whereas, on a decision so grave and
irreversible as the abandonment of an important city,
Washington esteemed himself to be under the obliga-
tion of consulting, and, (in the last resort,) of obeying,
Congress.
The consent of that body to the evacuation of New York
was obtained with much trouble, and by stages. On the
third of September, Congress had only got so far as to
1 American Revolution ; Part I., chapter viii.
* " The necessary preparations, and erecting batteries to facilitate the
landing upon the Island of New York, and battering the enemy's works
at Horen's Hook, occupied us till the fifteenth of September, when the
possession of New York was effected." The batteries under cover of
which the British ultimately landed on the island of New York were the
broadsides of their men-of-war; and the fleet might have been opposite
Kip's Bay by the first of September just as easily as a fortnight later on.
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THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
determine that, in the hypothetical case of the town prov-
ing to be untenable, it should not be destroyed, even
though its unburned houses would provide commodious
winter quarters for the British. Washington summoned
a council of war, which voted in favour of keeping five
thousand men in the city, and of establishing their main
force in a strong position some miles to the northward.
New York was quite sure to be taken, and its garrison
with it ; and therefore, so long as Congress was inclined
to maintain the place at all hazards, it was a less evil to
lose a quarter, than the whole, of the American army.
That is the utmost that can be said for the course which
the generals of that army agreed to adopt.
There were soldiers, and civilians too, who remon-
strated vigorously against a half measure which in their
eyes was the less respectable because it seemed inspired
by a desire to avoid the imputation of pusillanimity.
Charles Lee declared that, so far from clinging perti-
naciously to the islands, he would give Mr. Howe the
fee-simple of the whole group. Jay expressed his ap-
prehension that the hope of saving a few acres of terri-
tory would plunge the country into inextricable difficulties.
Colonel Rufus Putnam, in his official report as Chief Engi-
neer, represented to Washington that, so long as the
troops were extended from New York to King's Bridge,
the enemy would always be able to attack with superior
force; that, if the Southern army were caught in the
toils, and forced to surrender, nothing could prevent
Howe from reaching Albany; and that, when Albany
had fallen, the Northern army must forthwith quit Ticon-
deroga on pain of being annihilated. " I know," Putnam
wrote, " that this doctrine gives up New York to destruc-
tion, and exposes many other towns to be ravaged. But
what are ten or twenty towns to the grand object?"
Nathanael Greene contributed to the controversy a
paper of very drastic strategical advice, enforced by
apt historical instances, on which the leisure of con-
valescence tempted him to expatiate. He reminded
Washington that Francis the First, when his dominions
NEW YORK AND HAERLEM
295
were invaded by the Emperor of Germany, laid whole
provinces waste, and by that policy starved and ruined
Charles's army, and defeated him without a battle. And
yet, in the sixteenth century, Provence and Champagne
had been French, and loyal to the French King ; whereas
two thirds of the property in New York belonged to
Tories, who would receive no more than their deserts if
the city and the suburbs were levelled with the ground. 1
Washington was no Rostopchine ; and, as far as on
him depended, New York was not condemned to the
fate of Moscow. The dictates of humanity, combined
with the highest principles of statesmanship, forbade
him deliberately to set on fire a great city, the home of
twenty thousand people, even though his own party was
in a minority among them. Nor had the grave and im-
mediate danger which threatened his army been as yet
fully borne in on his convictions. The advice which he
addressed to Philadelphia was less clear-cut and em-
phatic than the crisis demanded ; 2 and at last the civil
authorities were beforehand with him in resolving to face
the inevitable. On the tenth of September, President
Hancock informed General Washington that it was by
no means the sense of Congress that the army, or any
part of it, should remain in the city a moment longer than
he should think it proper for the public service. Such
1 Regimental officers who could not, like Greene and Putnam, make
known their sentiments at head-quarters, talked freely among themselves
about the danger of lingering at New York. " There cannot," wrote a
Pennsylvanian captain, "remain a doubt that this city should have
been evacuated as soon as possible after the quitting of Long Island.
This was as obvious to me then as it is now; and I had backed my
opinion with the bet of a beaver hat that there would be no attempt
to defend it."
*"That the enemy mean to winter in New York there can be no
doubt. That, with such an armament, they can drive us out is equally
clear. The Congress having resolved that it should not be destroyed,
nothing seems to remain but to determine the time of their taking posses-
sion. It is our interest and wish to prolong it as much as possible, pro-
vided the delay docs not affect our future measures." That is an extract
from a letter of Washington to the President of Congress, dated as late as
the eighth of September. It most certainly cannot be read as an urgent
appeal for permission to hurry on the evacuation of the city.
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296 THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
an admission, — emanating from a quarter where a senti-
ment, or rather a passion, adverse to the policy of re-
tirement had notoriously prevailed, — was equivalent to
a command. Something had already been done towards
removing the enormous collection of stores which filled
New York ; and every effort was now devoted to acceler-
ate the process. The land transport was deficient ; but
cargoes of heavy goods were despatched by boat up the
Hudson River; an operation which the British Admiral,
with a negligence which was foreign to him, did nothing
to interrupt. Even thus the work went slowly ; and
meanwhile the army was so distributed as to present
an attractive opportunity for an enterprising enemy.
Washington's head-quarters, and his best troops, were
stationed on the heights of Haerlem, behind strong lines
which ran right across from sea to sea exactly half-way
up the peninsula. General Putnam remained in the city
with some infantry, and a few companies of artillery,
to preserve order in the streets, and to superintend the
depiction of the magazines ; while five brigades of militia
were posted at intervals along the eastern shore, ready
in case the British made a forward movement before the
city was finally abandoned.
Time was no longer wasted ; but far too much had
been lost already. After Washington's thoughts were
once fairly set upon departure, he did not enjoy an easy
moment ; and the acuteness of his anxiety was an un-
answerable condemnation both of his own temerity in
prolonging the retention of New York, and of Howe's
apathy in delaying to grasp the prize which so long had
been dangled before him. "I fully expected," Wash-
ington wrote on the fourteenth of September, "that an
attack somewhere would be made last night ; and happy
shall I be if my apprehensions of one to-night, or in a
day or two, are not confirmed by the event." Ever
since the month commenced, the British had been en-
camped on the northwest angle of Long Island, in
and about the villages of Newtown and Flushing, and
on the high ground which, from across the channel,
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NEW YORK AND HAERLEM 207
overlooked the centre of the American position. It
was not, however, until Friday the thirteenth that any
considerable naval force was transferred to the quarter
where its action could materially assist the army. On
that afternoon two ships of forty guns, and two of
twenty-eight guns, penetrated the East River, and
anchored above the city ; on the evening of the next
day they were reinforced by some of their consorts;
and at eleven o'clock on the morning of the fifteenth
of September a heavy cannonade was opened upon the
American troops who lined the earthworks at Kip's
Bay, where Thirty-fourth Street now comes down to
the water. At the same time four long columns of
barges, laden with British light infantry and German
Grenadiers, emerged from Newtown inlet. Their move-
ments were directed by Commodore Hotham ; an excel-
lent officer, whenever he had a still better officer to
command him. Hotham gave the signal ; and the
flotilla spread itself into line, and swept forward to the
hostile shore. It was an imposing spectacle. The
amazing fire from the shipping, the soldiers in scarlet
clambering up the steep rocks, and the river covered
with boats full of armed men pressing eagerly to the
shore, were described as forming one of the grandest
and most sublime stage-effects that had ever been ex-
hibited. 1
Such was the scene as painted by a British officer,
for the admiration of his home circle ; but those specta-
tors who occupied the front places opposite very soon
had enough of the show. The New England militia-
men who lined the coast were too intelligent to be de-
ceived as to the nature of the service demanded of
them, and too little disciplined to perform that service
heartily if it did not commend itself to their liking and
approval. They had been posted where they stood, as
every man of them was aware, in order to secure the
•
1 Captain William G. Evelyn, of the British Light Infantry, to his
aunt, Mrs. Boscowen, England: given in the Appendix to Mr. Henry
Johnston's important treatise on the Battle of Haerlem Heights.
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298 THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
retreat of the American army ; and they at once pro-
ceeded, by the most direct method, to secure the retreat
of that part of the army in whose safety they were
specially interested. The troops who were behind the
intrenchments ran away ; and two brigades, which had
been told off to support them, retired in confusion along
the Haerlem road. Washington, who had galloped up
to the sound of the cannon, shouted for the officers to
get their people off the highway, and place them behind
the walls, and among the fields of Indian corn, which
flanked it on either side ; but, on the appearance of
sixty or seventy red-coats, (as Washington counted
them,) the whole assemblage broke and fled. 1 Howe's
great chance had come. The garrison of New York,
— as well as three brigades of infantry which had been
stationed along the bank of the East River, south of the
point where the British landed, — might all be had for
the taking. An advance guard of the Hessians, with
little trouble, and no loss to themselves, secured three
hundred prisoners ; and not one of the retreating bat-
talions would ever have reached the American lines in
military order, and with half its full numbers, if Howe
had promptly pushed his troops athwart the peninsula,
which here was less than three thousand yards wide.
He had several hours to spare, while Putnam was rid-
ing furiously about the town, collecting the various por-
tions of his command, and starting them for Haerlem
Heights. Not till four of the afternoon did the British
commence a stately progress northward along the route
which, in modern New York, goes by the name of Fifth
Avenue ; while, on a parallel road, separated from them
only by the breadth of the present Central Park, the
long column of sweltering American militiamen toiled
over the ground now covered by those less fashionable
thoroughfares that more nearly skirt the Hudson River.
Putnam brought off safely all his regiments, and even
some of his field-pieces. Between fifty and sixty can-
1 Washington to the President of Congress; September 16, 1776.
American Archives; October 25.
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NEW YORK AND HAERLEM
299
non, mounted or dismounted, and a vast quantity of
shells and roundshot, remained in the city as a prize for
the victors. In both armies together, less than a score
of warriors bit the dust; and among the Americans
very few had so much as bitten a cartridge. Their
troops, (said one of their generals,) never fired a gun ;
but as soon as the British began to land, they ran as if
the devil was in them. 1
It was a day of small carnage, but of many legends. 3
According to a very popular American anecdote, the
British Commander-in-Chief never got further westward
than the country-seat of a New York merchant, which
stood on a pleasant eminence half-way across the penin-
sula. The owner of the house happened to be a
Quaker ; and, as such, he was almost as a matter of
course rich, and a Tory. His lady, however, — the
mother of Lindley Murray the grammarian, — held Revo-
lutionary principles, and was so handsome and attractive
that she might air them with impunity in any com-
pany whatsoever. She enjoys the credit of having kept
Howe and his generals drinking her husband's Madeira,
and listening to a merry argument on politics between
Governor Tryon and herself, until the day was so far
advanced that no time remained for arranging to inter-
1 General Gesar Rodney to Messrs. Reed and Mackean ; September 18,
6.
New York was taken on a Sunday. David How, (whose diary has
been quoted frequently in earlier chapters of the History of the American
Revolution,') arrived in camp from Boston on the twenty-sixth of August,
and at once fell into the busy, queer way of life which he always pursued
on active service. He had already been under cannon-fire ; had done a
good stroke of work on the Haerlcm intrenchments ; and had purchased
a jacket and a pair of breeches for fifteen shillings from one of his comrades.
As soon as he settled down in his new quarters, How was careful to
note the Sundays, and, (whenever he could get to meeting,) the text. On
the fifteenth of September he was too much occupied for church going ;
but he gives a discreet, and remarkably indulgent, account of the motives
which prompted the American retreat. "Our people thought best to
leave the lower part of the Town so that the shipping might not play on
us. Our army all marched to the upper part of the Town this after Noon."
This expression of " The Town" is here apparently used for the whole
township which covered the island of Manhattan.
•
300 THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
cept Putnam. There are other stories, not less widely
current, which represent Washington as having alto-
gether lost his self-restraint when his troops disbanded
themselves for headlong flight. Which, if any, of his
words and actions were truthfully reported it is at this
time impossible to distinguish ; but nothing is more cer-
tain than that, during some minutes of bitter agony, he
showed himself indifferent to the preservation of a life
which belonged to his country, and was not his own to
throw away. When ail allowance has been made for
exaggeration, the semi-mythical narratives of that Sun-
day morning and afternoon have their value as embody-
ing the indelible impression left on the public mind of
America by Howe's untimely inactivity, and by Wash-
ington's disappointment and despair. 1
That despair endured through the night, but was
dispelled ere the morrow closed. " We are now en-
camped," (Washington wrote at sunrise on the sixteenth
of September,) " on the Heights of Haerlem, where I
should hope the enemy would meet with a defeat in
case of an attack, if the generality of our troops should
behave with tolerable bravery. But experience, to my
extreme affliction, has convinced me that this is rather
to be wished for than expected. However, I trust there
are many who will act like men, and show themselves
worthy of the blessings of freedom. I have sent out
some reconnoitring parties to gain intelligence." The
post had only just gone off with the General's letter
when news was brought that the British were advancing.
Washington's scouts had come into collision with Howe's
outposts, and had retired after a sharp and close ex-
change of musketry. The American army turned out at
the noise of the firing, and covered Haerlem Heights
with a triple line of infantry divisions. At length the
1 General Greene's soher phrases relate as much of the truth as is worth
knowing. " Fcllows's and Parsons** whole brigade ran away from about
fifty men, and left his Excellency on the ground within eighty yards of the
enemv, so vexed at the infamous conduct of the troops that he sought
death rather than life."
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NEW YORK AND HAERLEM 3OI
English van-guard came into view, — splendid troops,
overflowing with contempt for a foe whom they had
thrice within one month chased and scattered ; and whom,
now that he had taken refuge in his intrenchments,
their buglers tauntingly saluted with the hunting-call
which announced that a fox had gone to ground.
Washington saw his opportunity, and sent out a detach-
ment which, cleverly pushed forward and then in turn
withdrawn, tempted his impetuous adversaries down into
the valley that lay in front of the American lines. In the
meantime two hundred riflemen and rangers, the flower
of the Virginian and New England sharpshooters, fetched
a circuit to the eastward with the intention of encom-
passing, and cutting off, the English skirmishers. The
Southerners were commanded by Major Leitch, and the
Northerners by Captain Thomas Knowlton, whose
youthful promise has won him a place in the affec-
tionate memory of his countrymen. By some mis-
take their attack commenced too soon, in flank, and not
in rear, of the force which was opposed to them ; but,
when once begun, it was pushed home. The English
fell back, fighting stiffly, and making the pursuit a very
dangerous form of sport to those who followed them.
They retreated no further than the spot where they
found their reinforcements, which consisted of two
battalions of light companies, and the Forty-second
Highlanders, with the welcome addition of a couple of
field-pieces. Then they took their stand along a slope
crowned by a field of buckwheat, not far from the vil-
lage of Bloomingdale, on ground which is now over-
looked by the bold and imposing dome of President
Grant's mausoleum.
It is a pity that old Ulysses was not there to see ; for
it was the sort of fight which he liked to watch, and
knew well how to set going. The American supports
came thronging up, accompanied by many superior
officers whose special functions should have kept them
elsewhere ; but the recollections of yesterday were ran-
kling in their breasts, and they were determined that on
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302 THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
this occasion the result should be such as would do the
army credit. The Bloomingdale road, on that forenoon,
was a very bad neighbourhood for shirkers. General
George Clinton had left his pistols behind him in camp,
or otherwise he would, (so he declared,) have shot " a
puppy of an officer " whom he caught skulking off in
the heat of the action. Colonel Reed, the Adjutant
General, when he had extricated himself from under
his dying horse, had a private battle of his own with a
runaway made desperate by terror. 1 A vast majority
of the men, however, needed no driving ; and they were
superbly led. Knowlton was slain on the field. Leitch
had three balls through him, and died a fortnight after.
Nor did the Provincials fire in the air. Nineteen holes
were counted in a single rail of the fence behind which
the British infantry had been posted. On both sides the
loss was heavy for the numbers who had been engaged.
The English list of casualties was the larger ; but more of
the Americans were killed outright ; for our light in-
fantry were marksmen selected from all the regiments,
and shot like so many backwoodsmen. 2 The conflict
ended towards three in the afternoon, a couple of miles
to the south of Haerlem Heights. Howe had ordered
up several more English battalions, and von Donop's
brigade of Hessians ; and on their approach the firing
ceased, and the combatants retired to their respective
1 " I suppose many persons will think it was rash and imprudent for officers
of our rank to go into such an action. General Putnam, General Greene,
Mr. Tilghman, and many of the General's family were in it ; but it was really
done to animate the troops, who were quite dispirited, and would not go
into danger unless their officers led the way. " That is an extract from a
letter written by the Adjutant General to his wife. One of the fugitives
pointed his musket at Colonel Reed, and pulled the trigger. The Colo-
nel thereupon seized a piece from a soldier, and snapped it at his assailant;
but both guns missed fire. 4 « He has been tried," (Reed said,) "and is
now under sentence of death ; but I believe I must beg him off, as, after I
could not get the gun off, I wounded him in the head, and cut off his
thumb with my hanger." And so the man lived ; and, for all that history
knows, he may have figured as a mutilated soldier of the Revolution on
Fourth of July platforms in the nineteenth century.
*"Thc troops fought well on both sides, and gave great proofs of their
marksmanship." General Heath's Memoir t ; September 10, 1776.
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NEW YORK AND HAERLEM
303
quarters. That is the account given in Washington's
despatch ; and his story is confirmed by a young officer
in a famous English regiment, who lived to conquer
Mysore at the head of the largest British army that had
ever marched to victory in India. " We were trotted about
three miles, (without a halt to draw breath,) to support
a battalion of light infantry which had imprudently ad-
vanced so far as to be in great danger of being cut off.
This must have happened, but for our haste. The in-
stant the front of our columns appeared, the enemy be-
gan to retire to their works, and our light infantry to
camp. On our return we were exposed to the fire of
the Americans. A man in my company had his hat
shot through, nearly in the direction of my wound, but
the ball merely raised the skin." So wrote Captain
Harris, of the Fifth Fusiliers, whose head had been
broken by a bullet at Bunker's Hill. He had now come
back from hospital, in fine spirits and with a very solid
appetite, 1 to serve another turn in that rude apprentice-
ship which in his case was the path to lofty fortunes.
Howe claimed the affair as a success; but his best
officers thought differently. Sir Henry Clinton, long
afterwards, recorded his view in a note on the margin
of Stedman's History. " The ungovernable impetu-
osity," (he wrote,) "of the light troops drew us into this
scrape." Colonol von Donop, a very gallant man, and
no boaster, reported that, if it had not been for the
opportune arrival of his Jagers, the Highlanders and
the British Light Infantry would perhaps have been
1 " We placed our picquets ; borrowed a sheep ; killed, cooked, and
ate some of it ; and then went to sleep on a gate which we took the lib-
erty of throwing off its hinges. The sixteenth of September, before we
started in the morning, our dinner, consisting of a goose and a piece of
mutton, had been put on the fire. Our domestic deposited the above-named
delicacies on a chaise, and followed us with it to our ground. When the
fight was over, he again hung the goose to the fire, but the poor bird had
been scarcely half done when we were ordered to return to our station.
There again we commenced cooking, and, though without dish, or plate,
or knife, did ample justice to our fare, which we washed down with bad rum
and water, and then composed ourselves to rest on our friendly gate."
Captain George Harris to his uncle ; September 1776.
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304 THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
captured. Von Donop's estimate of the serious char-
acter of the engagement at Haerlem was shared by the
professional grumblers of the army, who were not so
modest, and most of them not so brave, as the veteran
German. One of these gentry took into his confidence
some American prisoners confined on a hulk which was
stationed in the Bay. On Sunday, (we are told,) he
came on board, abusing the Yankees for runaway cow-
ards, who would not stand their ground long enough to
give a British officer a chance of getting honour and pro-
motion. He was in the Monday's action also, and re-
turned in the evening cursing the war, and saying that,
after all, the Americans would fight, and that it would be
impossible to conquer them. 1 Washington, in measured
and tranquil language, imparted the relief and satisfac-
tion, which filled his own mind, to the pleased and re-
pentant army. "The behaviour of yesterday," (so ran
his General Order of September the seventeenth,) " was
such a contrast to that of some troops the day before as
must show what can be done where officers and soldiers
exert themselves." And so it comes about that Haerlem,
— though not among the decisive, and still less the
gigantic, battles of the world, — has always been fondly
regarded by American writers as a turning-point in the
uphill progress of their national military efficiency.
The spread of New York City has obliterated all
rustic features of the locality ; for the district over which
the contest swayed to and fro now lies between One
Hundred and Fifth Street to the south, and One Hun-
dred and Thirty-first Street to the northward. Patriotic
antiquaries must find what consolation they may in the
reflection that the hollow lane, into which the British
skirmishers rashly descended, and the bush-grown
ledges where Knowlton fell, are now worth a great
many more dollars a square yard than the sacred soil of
Thermopylae or Bannockburn. A very different fate,
1 Extract from the MS. Literary Diary and "Journal of Occurrence*
kept by Dr. Stiles, in possession of Yale University, as given in Mr. John
ston's Battle of Haerlem Heights.
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NEW YORK AND HAERLEM
305
from the point of the picturesque, has befallen another
Haerlem, from which the American village originally
derived its name. On the narrow north front of that
old Dutch city lie the bastion of the Cross and the bas-
tion of St. John, where over the space of six full months
a terrible conflict raged between the burgesses and their
wives on the one hand, and the son and the soldiers of
Alva on the other. Those bastions now form the ter-
race-walks of a little pleasure ground, sloping down to
an ornamental canal which formerly was the town moat.
It is a scene to be visited in early summer. Then, out
of the sweet green foliage, just across the water, in a
bend of the winding pool, there rises a graceful tower
attached to an ancient almshouse. All the front part of
the building, which the Dutch cannon ruined, was re-
constructed in the seventeenth century ; but a closer
examination discovers, to the rear of the group of dwell-
ings, a small outhouse which, in the gable of its high-
pitched roof, displays a date some ten years anterior to
the siege of 1573, and which looks its age. Behind those
very walls the veterans from Spain and Italy were over
and over again mustered, in preparation for furious and
fruitless assaults on the crumbling breach and the starv-
ing garrison. Nowhere, perhaps, are associations so
thrilling, and so authentic, gathered around so fair a
spot as that which the long death-grapple between mar-
tial discipline, and homely valour, made horrible for a
space of time, and ennobled for ever.
ft. n.— vol. r. x
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CHAPTER IX
WHITE PLAINS. VALCOUR ISLAND. THE WESTCHESTER
LOYALISTS
During the rest of the summer Howe lingered at New
York, opposite the American lines, which were elab-
orately fortified, and manned by six times as many
troops as were sufficient to defend them. He easily
found a justification for not attempting to carry that
impregnable position by direct assault. In 1779, when
he was addressing the House of Commons in his own
defence, he laid it down as the most essential duty of a
general never wantonly to expose His Majesty's troops
in a case where the required end could be attained with
little bloodshed. As for Haerlem Heights, (he truly
urged,) the loss of a thousand or fifteen hundred Royal
soldiers would have been an excessive price to pay for
the capture of intrenchments which the Americans
could not have held, even for a very few days, after
the British had once begun to break ground towards
their own right flank by proceeding to occupy the
neighbouring peninsula of Westchester. The reasons,
however, which Howe gave for allowing those very few
days to extend themselves into not a few weeks were
miserably inadequate. He pleaded ignorance of the
mainland which lay to the eastward. The country,
(he said,) was ill adapted for reconnoitring-parties of
infantry ; he was badly provided with cavalry, for most
of his horse-transports were still on their passage out
from England ; and little or nothing could be learned
from the inhabitants, who were totally unable to supply
a military description of the districts in which they
resided. Nor was this the only, or the most serious,
306
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WHITE PLAINS
307
point on which Howe's expectations of assistance from
the American Loyalists had been falsified ; for he con-
fessed that, to his infinite chagrin, the colonists were not
so well disposed to enlist in the service of the Crown as,
before leaving England, he had been taught to anticipate. 1
Some years after this date, — when the most sanguine
among the English Ministers had given up all hopes of
conquering the North in the North itself, and when the
war had been transferred to the Southern provinces, —
inhabitants of those provinces freely rallied to the
British standards. In the course of the long and dubi-
ous struggle for the possession of Georgia and the
Carolinas, the Royal cause was aided, and sometimes
sadly discredited, by bands of numerous, devoted, and
much too truculent partisans. But taking into account
the whole of the Southern levies, — and including all
the King's Rangers, and Queen's Rangers, and Royal
Fencibles, and Royal Guides and Pioneers, and Loyal
American Legionaries, and Prince of Wales's Volunteers,
throughout the entire continent, — the sum total of
colonists who took arms for the Crown, between 1775 and
1 783, did not exceed twenty-five thousand. During those
years the State of Massachusetts alone furnished twice
that number of recruits to the armies of the Republic. 2
A very interesting description of rural Loyalists
1 Sir William Howe's speech of April 22, 1779, in the Parliamentary
History of England ; Vol. XX., pages 679, 680. When examined before
Parliament in the May of the same year, Lord Cornwallis stated that a
knowledge of America, for military purposes, was extremely difficult to
be obtained from the inhabitants. Little or no information, (he said,) could
be got by reconnoitring, as the country was everywhere hilly, and covered
with wood ; intersected by ravines, creeks, and marshes ; and presenting
at every quarter of a mile a post fitted for ambuscades.
2 Chapters iv. and viii. of the Historical Essay prefixed to Sabine's
American loyalists. Mr. Sabine is a just-minded and well-informed
writer ; and his feeling towards the Loyalists of the Revolution was such
that he might safely be trusted not to under-rate the sacrifices which they
made to their opinions. When he estimates the troops contributed by
Massachusetts to the Continental army at nearly seventy thousand,
I respectfully think, even judging from his own data, that he is over
the mark. The number given in my text may be relied upon as well
within it.
308 THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
in the province of New York is given by Mr. Henry
Dawson, a writer of our own generation, whose sym-
pathies, if not hostile to the Revolution, are at all events
very strongly against the Revolutionists. The farmers
of Westchester County, in Mr. Dawson's view, were
universally conservatives; but "their simple domestic
habits, and controlling love of home," rendered them
averse to fight for their political creed. Their fidelity
to the Royal cause, (so he tells us,) was inspired by
recollections of the quiet times which they had enjoyed
under the Royal Government; when good feeling between
neighbours, regard among friends, and affection in
families, had not yet been banished from their corner
of the earth ; before ever the strife of faction prevailed
through the land, and the people " hunted every man
his brother with a net." 1 Tories were Tories because
they loved and regretted the old peaceful days ; and, if
they could not get back peace as a community, they
were determined to have as small a share of war as pos-
sible in their character of individuals. Few, of their own
choice, joined the Royal army ; and those among them
whom Whig persecution drove from their homes, and
constrained to take refuge in the English ranks, became
reluctant and exceedingly unprofessional soldiers. The
innocent letters which they wrote to their parents from
camp fully explain what Sir William Howe, and Lord
Cornwallis, meant when they told the House of Commons
that very little military information of value could be
extracted from the country folk of New York and New
Jersey. It may readily be believed that the Selectman
of a loyal district, with the best will in the world to
assist King George's officers, could not throw much
light upon the strength, and probable destination, of an
American column which had marched once across his
township, when his sons in the cantonments on Long
Island failed to guess, within fifty thousand men, the
numbers of the British and Hessians in the midst of
1 Paper by Mr. Henry B. Dawson, inserted in the History of WttUhttUt
County, New York.
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WHITE PLAINS
309
whom they lived, and whose battalions they might
count, like so many pawns on a chess-board, as often
as the army was paraded. 1
Howe remained in front of Washington's position for
four livelong weeks after the fight at Haerlem, slowly
and painfully erecting earthworks which the American
spadesmen would have thrown up in the course of as
many days and nights; writing testy despatches to the
War Office in London ; and chaffering with the Ameri-
can Government about the relative value of the prisoners
whom he had lost and the prisoners whom he had cap-
tured. A bargain was at length concluded. Lord
Stirling was exchanged for a Royal governor, and
Sullivan for an English brigadier named Prescott,
whom Montgomery had taken at Montreal. Howe
sent over for Washington's inspection a bullet fixed on
the end of a nail, which had been found in a deserted
American encampment, and expressed himself as well
assured that the contrivance had not come to the
knowledge of the American commander; and Washing-
ton replied that no pains should be spared in order
to prevent so wicked and infamous a practice being
adopted in his army. It was a very interesting corre-
spondence, but the price of postage was excessively high ;
inasmuch as every additional fortnight that Howe loi-
tered on Manhattan Island cost the British Treasury
more than the whole annual revenue derived from the
British Post Office. On the night of the twentieth
of September a conflagration broke out in New York
City, and consumed more than a tenth part of the
1 M Honoured Mother, and Brother*, and Siiter, it hath pleased God
of his Bountiful goodness, among the rest of abilities Bestowed upon me,
to give me a small use of the Pen, the Noblest of Arts, that I may convey
the Ideas of my mind Though at ever so great a Distance. It hath been
my Misfortune to Seek on this Island a place of Refuge from wicked and
ungodly men. Eli is well ; and likewise I are well. Caleb and Nathan
are well likewise. Our army Consists now of Eighty Thousand, Besides
Rangers, and 200 Transports is expected every day laden with men.
Unless the rebels lay down their arms, and accept of Mercy, they will be
destroyed and cut off." Letter from Newtown, Long Island; Sept. a8,
1776.
310 THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
four thousand tenements before the troops and sailors
could get the flames under. In the panic and wrath
consequent upon such an event, at such a moment,
each of the adversaries accused the other of having
deliberately set the town on fire. The British and Ger-
man soldiers, being the stronger party of the two, acted
upon their own theory of the case, and executed sum-
mary and indiscriminate vengeance upon individuals
whom they suspected. "The gentleman," wrote Wash-
ington, " who brought the letter from General Howe,
told Colonel Reed that several of our countrymen had
been punished with various deaths, some by hanging,
others by burning." Governor Tryon, judging another
by himself, did not scruple to affirm that Washington
had devised the plot; had selected and instructed the
actual incendiaries; and had sent all the bells of the
churches out of town, under pretence of casting them into
cannon, in order to prevent the alarm of fire being given
from the steeples. 1 It is now almost universally believed
in the United States that the calamity was accidental.
Whatever might have been its origin, the affair was an
object-lesson of real importance; for the soldiers of the
Government by whose orders Falmouth and Norfolk
were laid in ashes had it very forcibly brought home to
their convictions that it was a crime to destroy a town. 2
At length Howe once more set his troops in motion ;
and the movement, though tardy, was strongly and
1 Governor Tryon to Lord George Germaine : New York, Sept. 24, 1 776.
a The Librarian of the New York Historical Society has been good
enough to place in my hands a paper drawn up by his late brother, Mr.
William Kelby, who preceded him in his present office. This compilation,
printed in 1866 in the Manual of the Corporation of the City of New York,
contains extracts relating to the Great Fire taken from histories written
near the time, from official despatches, from authoritative newspaper re-
ports, and from contemporary private letters. There was talk of a thou-
sand, or even fifteen hundred, buildings having perished ; but the most
precise computation, which classed the houses destroyed according to
the districts, placed them at four hundred and ninety-three. A great
multitude of persons were arrested and examined ; but no evidence was
found against them, and they, one and all, were set at liberty. In a city
under military government, and in a case where severity to the utmost limit
of justice was a public duty, such lenity would never have been displayed
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WHITE PLAINS
311
thoughtfully planned; as was the case with all his
operations throughout the campaign until the period
arrived when success had relaxed the springs of caution.
His scheme was to leave, behind his intrenchments on
Manhattan Island, a force adequate to protect New
York from attack during the next few days ; and within
a few days the danger would be over. He himself pur-
posed to shift eastwards, and place his main army in
the peninsula of Westchester, on the flank and rear of
the Americans, directly between them and their base
of supply in Connecticut. British warships, meanwhile,
were to ascend the North River, and cut off Washing-
ton from a retreat into the province of New Jersey.
With promptitude, conduct, and a reasonable share
of good fortune, Howe had every hope of capturing the
best and largest part of the American forces. The
project, in the earlier stages, was ably and luckily exe-
cuted. Lord Percy, with three brigades, took charge
of the fortifications which covered the city. At dawn
on the twelfth of October, 1776, eighty vessels, of all
sorts and sizes, heavily laden with British troops, passed
between Montresor's Island and the northern shore of
Long Island, and stood up the Sound; and they were
followed in the afternoon of the same day by another
fleet of from forty to fifty sail. The whole force was
disembarked at Frog's Point, in the extreme southeast
corner of the Westchester peninsula. 1 The withdrawal
of the army from the vicinity of the American camp,
if there had been any serious belief in the minds of the authorities that
the fire was intentional.
Nothing is known of the antecedents of those who were put to death on
the night of the conflagration, except in one case only. " There were very
few inhabitants in the city at that time; and many of those were afraid
to venture out at night in the streets, fearing of being taken up as sus-
picious persons. An instance to my knowledge occurred. A Mr. White,
a decent citi/en and house-carpenter, rather too violent a loyalist, who
latterly had addicted himself to liquor, was on the night of the fire hanged
on a tavern sign-post at the corner of Cherry and Roosevelt streets."
That passage occurs in Mr. David Trim's narrative.
1 These places are all indicated, and the general features of the cam-
paign portrayed, in the map at the end of this volume.
3 1 2 THE AMERICAN RE VOL UTIOX
and its removal to a new scene of action, were con-
cealed from hostile eyes by a thick fog which en-
shrouded land and sea. That circumstance, however,
neither disturbed nor impeded the naval operations; so
perfect were Lord Howe's arrangements, and so ad-
mirable the skill of our sailors, and the discipline of
our soldiers, amid a maze of tortuous channels and
rapid and uncertain currents. General Howe spent
six days in the immediate neighbourhood of the spot
where he had landed ; while the ships went and came,
laden with his military stores and provisions, as well as
with the horses and waggons required for their convey-
ance on the journey up-country. That interval of time
may have been well employed ; but, when the advance
at last began, the forward movement of the British
was dilatory beyond all explanation or conception. It
was not until the twenty-fifth of October that their
columns encamped on Bronx River ; a league, and more,
to the south of the White Plains. The sun had set
and risen more than forty times since General Howe
broke up his summer cantonments on Staten Island.
In seven weeks, — with an irresistible army, and a fleet
which there was nothing to resist, — he had traversed,
from point to point, a distance of exactly thirty miles.
Thus far into the bowels of the land had he marched,
but, (unlike the Earl of Richmond in Shakespeare's
drama,) not without impediment. When Washington
had assured himself that the war was transferred to the
mainland which lay to the east of him, he passed his
army over King's Bridge, and edged it gradually north-
wards along the right bank of the Bronx River. His
progress was slow and painful ; for almost all his pro-
vision of wheel-transport had been abandoned on Long
Island, or captured by the British in New York ; and
he could not avail himself of water-carriage because
Lord Howe's forty-four-gun ships had got past his bat-
teries on the Hudson River, and had acquired an undis-
puted mastery of the upper, as well as the lower, reaches.
With the double object of delaying General Howe's
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WHITE PLAINS 313
advance, and teaching his own troops to stand fire,
Washington detached strong parties in a southernly
direction with a commission to watch and, (wherever
they saw an opportunity,) to harass the enemy. His
people behaved well in several brisk encounters; and
they were all the more pleased with themselves because
their successes were won against a corps of Provincial
loyalists, who, in their judgement, had no call to help
the invaders, and against Hessians who had no business
in the country at all. The activity of the American
riflemen multiplied their apparent numbers to the im-
agination of their opponents, and provided Howe with
a motive, or an excuse, for altogether superfluous
prudence and deliberation. When he arrived near
White Plains he found Washington's army already
planted across his path. He again waited three days ; and
then, on Monday the twenty-eighth of October, orders
were issued for a general engagement which, however
ineffectually it terminated, at all events began in earnest.
Of that engagement there exist numerous narratives,
as rich in similes drawn from the phenomena of
nature as any battle of Homer. M We fired a volley at
the Hessian Grenadiers at about twenty rods distance,
and scattered them like leaves in a whirlwind. They
ran away so far that some of our regiments ran out to
the ground where they were, and brought off their arms
and accoutrements, and rum, that the men who fell
had with them ; which we had time to drink round
before they came on again." 1 So cheerful was the
account subsequently transmitted to the newspapers by
a Gentleman in General Washington's Army; but that
army, to all appearance, cannot be said to have en-
joyed itself greatly at the time. The Americans were
ill posted ; and their performance was what might be
expected from raw troops who had some good stuff
among them. A considerable body of Provincial in-
fantry with which, (if only it had held its ground,) the
advancing British would first have come in contact, re-
1 American Archives; November 1776.
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314 THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
treated hastily and in confusion. Howe next assaulted
a bold and rocky eminence, situated a mile to the
west of the lines behind which the main force of the
Americans lay. This isolated height, known as Chat-
terton's Hill, was occupied by a few slender battalions,
numbering barely fourteen hundred men, who defended
the position with coolness and tenacity. They were
assailed by eight well-drilled regiments, supported by a
powerful artillery to which they had very inadequate
means of replying. 1 It was afterwards said by the
Hessian Adjutant General that the German batteries
made a thunderstorm, in which no man could either see
or hear; 2 and the effect, as witnessed from across the
valley, was still more impressive. The scene, (wrote an
American officer,) was grand and solemn ; the adjacent
hills bellowed and trembled, and smoked like volcanoes ;
the air groaned with streams of shot, and echoed with the
bursting of shells ; and men's limbs and bodies strewed
the ground, and the fences and walls were torn in pieces.
All the same, there was plenty of cover left ; and the
Marylanders and New Yorkers took steady aim from
behind it They and their comrades kept in play five
regiments which attacked them in front, and retired
only when three other regiments had turned their left
flank. They got away safely " in a great body ; neither
running, nor observing the best order." 8 None of their
wounded, who could stand upon their feet, remained
behind to be taken. The Delaware regiment, which
had learned at Long Island that prisoners are not easily
1 Lieutenant Colonel Haslet, who commanded the Delaware battalion,
wrote as follows: "The General ordered one field-piece forward, and that
so poorly appointed that myself was forced to assist in dragging it along in
rear of the regiment. While so employed a cannon-ball struck the car-
riage, and scattered the shot about ; a wad of tow blazing in the middle.
The artillerymen fled. One alone was prevailed upon to tread out the blaze
and collect the shot." There were three American cannon somewhere on
the hill ; but that is the only gun of which the history is authentically
known.
8 The Hessians, and the other German Auxiliaries of Great Britain
in the Revolutionary War; by Edward J. Lowell ; New York, 1884.
" Memoirs of Major General Heath.
WHITE PLAINS
315
made unless they make themselves, brought up the rear,
and fought sullenly and composedly while any of the
assailants followed them within shooting range. But
the pursuit was neither long nor fierce. When the
British and the Germans arrived on the summit of
Chatterton's Hill, they formed and dressed their line.
Their arms glittered in the bright sun ; and to the view
of Washington and the generals around him, who in
their own camp saw little of war under its ornamental
aspect, they made a most gallant show. That was the
end of the battle. Neither on the same day, nor after-
wards, did Howe thrust his whole army at, and across,
the American lines with vigour and intention such as
Frederic displayed against the Austrians at Prague, or
Wellington against the French on the Nivelle and the
Bidassoa. The position occupied by Washington on
the twenty-eighth of October was not strong by nature ;
and the attempt to make it formidable by art had been
baffled by the stony character of the soil, which did not
admit of the ditches being deep or the parapets high. 1
Though there is, of course, no certainty in war, it is the
first business of a general to discern, and to decide, what
risks should be taken. Howe had travelled all the way
from England in order to destroy the American army ;
and he now had such a chance at it as never occurred
again. But in every heap of fresh-turned mould he
seemed to see the blood-stained earthworks of Bunker's
Hill ; and he was appalled by the possibility, — the only
thing in the world of which he was afraid, — that he
might have to look on at a slaughter of his soldiers from
that safe distance where, as Commander-in-Chief, he
himself was in duty bound to remain. 2 At White Plains,
1 History of Westchester County ; Vol. I., page 449. The story of White
Plains is there told with scrupulous care, and in vast detail.
a Howe's promotion was differently viewed by the ladies of a family
which had already lost one beloved and revered member in the warfare
of the American forests. " Mrs. Howe,'' said Lady Sarah Bunbury, M is
vastly better since the General was made Commander-in-Chief ; for he is
at least safe for a time, and safe from bush-fighting, which seemed the
most to be dreaded as more frequent than a regular action."
316 THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
so far as the affair had gone, there was very little car-
nage. The Americans, who ran, had run so soon, —
and those who stood had fought so knowingly, — that
their loss, all told, did not exceed two hundred men.
Of English and Germans something more than that
number were killed or wounded ; and particular sym-
pathy was expressed in the British mess-tents for a
Colonel of the Thirty-fifth Foot, who was shot dead in
front of his regiment a short while after he had come
into a legacy of forty thousand pounds. 1
Howe had the less reason for omitting to press his
advantage because he had quite recently obtained some
fresh troops, who for the most part were eager for bat-
tle. He was reinforced just before the engagement, in
the very presence of the enemy, by another division of
Hessians, four thousand strong ; by the contingent from
the Principality of Waldeck ; and by two English regi-
ments of Light Dragoons. One of them was commanded
by the Honourable William Harcourt, an accomplished
leader of cavalry, and an officer whose curious fate des-
tined him, at the most critical moment of the war, to per-
form an inestimable service to the American cause. It
is quite unnecessary to say that he was an honourable and
virtuous man ; seeing that in after years he became, and
long remained, the intimate personal friend of George the
Third, who had a very different standard for the compan-
ions of his private life, and for the instruments of his
public policy. Colonel Harcourt now, at the age of three-
and-thirty, was going out to serve his King in buoyant
humour, and amply provided with all appliances which
could conduce to his dignity and comfort. He was the
younger son of the first Earl Harcourt, then Lord Lieu-
tenant of Ireland, a nobleman of the good old school.
Rich and public-spirited, Lord Harcourt had raised a regi-
ment for the defence of the country during the rebellion of
1 745 ; and, when the son became a captain of cavalry, his
entire troop was enlisted and equipped at the father's
cost. Now that Colonel Harcourt was sailing for
1 Journal kept during the campaign by Colonel Enoch Markham,
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WHITE PLAINS
America in high command there was nothing which his
family thought too good for him. They wanted to
marry him to an heiress ; a part of his outfit which he
emphatically declined to accept. 1 His father pressed
upon him a whole sideboard of plate, from which he
selected a few useful and portable articles. He took in
his train a Swiss servant, an old hussar who had smelt
powder in the Seven Years' War; a cook who had
served Lord Dunmore and General Gage ; and a groom
who had made a sea voyage with horses to the West
Indies. "Your mind," (so the Colonel informed Lord
Harcourt,) "will be perfectly at ease when I tell you
that the transport in which I propose to embark is an
extreme good sailer, remarkably strong, and very com-
modious ; and, what is of still more consequence, that I
am sure of having the Agent of Transports with me.
In short, I shall have every advantage of a man-of-war,
without any of its inconveniences." 2
Harcourt, however, was no carpet soldier. He was
always prepared to take the rough with the smooth ;
and on his way out to America he had it very rough
indeed. He started from Portsmouth late in June ; and
the nineteenth of July found the convoy at Falmouth,
replenishing water and forage, after two unsuccessful
attempts to get clear of the Channel. His regiment
reached New York on the seventh of October, having
lost on the passage enough horses to have mounted half
a troop. Harcourt's own chargers, however, bore the
1 " I could not do more than catch a sight of the girl at Ranelagh.
With respect to her person, I cannot say it is either disgusting or the con-
trary ; but I find that the father is a vulgar fellow, and that he has already
ofTered his daughter to half a dozen different people, — among whom arc
Charles Fox and Bolingbroke, — who have all of them broken off on the
subject of Settlement. I am free to declare that I would rather marry an
amiable woman, whom I liked, than this girl with all her pretensions, and
what is worse, with all her family." Letter from Colonel Harcourt of
May 23, 1776. Vol. XII. of the Harcourt Papers; Edited by Edward
William Harcourt of Stanton Harcourt, and Nuneham Courtney, in the
county of Oxfordshire.
a Colonel the Hon. W. Harcourt to hit father, Earl Harcourt ; Harcourt
House, April 3, 1776.
318 THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
journey well ; and the army was soon talking both of
them and of him. On a scouting expedition, (for he
liked to see near-hand and with his own eyes,) he was
once in imminent danger of being captured ; whereupon
he put his thorough-bred at a very high fence, knocked
off the top rail, and rejoined his men in safety. But he
could ride towards the enemy as well as away from
them. Great things were expected of the British
cavalry by the Government at home, and especially by
Lord George Germaine, the Colonial Secretary ; 1 and
that expectation was not disappointed. At White
Plains, their eagerness to advance within stroke of
sabre was a main incentive to that premature retirement
of the American advance-guard by which the engage-
ment was prefaced. Indeed, the unexpected apparition
of mounted warriors, among those armies of infantry,
created an impression somewhat similar to that pro-
duced by the cavaliers of Pizarro and Cortes upon the
primitive inhabitants of Peru and Mexico. Washington,
in grave and measured phrases, confessed that his mili-
tiamen seemed unacquainted with the enemy's horse,
and did not meet them with the same alacrity which
they showed in other cases. Having no dragoons of
his own, he did his best to combat the apprehensions
of the soldiers by a General Order. Speaking from his
long military experience, he assured them that, in a
broken country full of stone walls, cavalry were the
least formidable of all adversaries, because they could
not leave the roads ; and he promised them a hundred
dollars for every trooper whom they could bring in
prisoner with his horse and his accoutrements.
A very few days elapsed ; and Howe's opportunity
for forcing Washington to a battle on Westchester pen-
insula had finally departed. On the last night of Octo-
1 " A great man in Administration," (so the Public Advertiser reported,)
" whose military knowledge is unquestionable, is said to build his prin-
cipal hope* as to a conquest of America upon the activity and resolution
of the British Light Horse ; who, fit is to be presumed,) are to gallop
somewhat faster than the cavalry did at Minden."
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WHITE PLAINS
319
ber, the Americans retired to a line of heights a short
distance in rear of their former position. Felling the
timber with the energy of a people who, during al-
most every year of their history, had cleared away as
much forest as would cover half an English county, —
and building the trunks into a wall, and interlacing the
branches into an abattis, with practised dexterity, — in
an incredibly short space of time they made their front
as impenetrable as the curtain of a fortress. There
they awaited the turn of events, in fairly good case,
and with great and increasing complacency. A Massa-
chusetts Brigadier told the authorities of his State that
the Continental troops were stationed on a ridge of hills
almost inaccessible on the side which faced the enemy,
and finely covered with woods. Officers and soldiers,
(so the despatch ran,) were in high spirits, and deter-
mined not to yield an inch to the invader. The British
were labouring to out-flank them; but the General,
divinely inspired, had been apprised of the design, and
Howe would soon have to tread his surly steps back to
the quarter whence he came. 1 The Americans, (this
officer went on to say,) had not more sick than might be
expected in so numerous an army ; and there was good
flour, beef, and pork in plenty, with grog to wash it
down. " A lordly mansion," (a worthy New England
Colonel wrote,) " never contained more health and con-
tentment than the little cell, half underground, that I
occupy here in the fields, dwelling with my own people." 2
The accounts from the front were so exhilarating that
civilians at a distance were tempted to visit a scene
where they might find the pleasure of intense excite-
ment, combined with every circumstance of security.
1 The same view had for some while been held by Captain Tilghman,
who was already an acting aide-de-camp to Washington, and as good a
judge as most. M I am really in hopes," (he wrote on the twenty-third of
October,) " that we have fairly outflanked General Howe. We press him
close to the ground, from which he has made no Westing, in the sea-
phrase; and if he makes much more Easting, and endeavours to stretch
across, he will need as large an army as Xerxes to form a line."
a Colonel Jedediah Huntingdon of Connecticut to Governor Trumbull.
320 THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
* Mrs. Clinton," (her husband was informed,) " has a
great desire to see the enemy routed. If there is any
action while she is near camp, she wishes to go on a hill
and see it, if you should not be engaged in it, which she
would wish to know at the time." 1
A most dangerous optimism, from which the Com-
mander-in-Chief almost alone was free, reigned through-
out the American army. As the actual experiences of
Long Island, and Haerlem, and White Plains, receded
in the distance, the distressful emotions of battle faded
from the memory of the common men ; and only a sense
of self-respect, and even self-admiration, remained.
The militia began to regard themselves as invincible;
a persuasion which was accompanied by a strong, and to
very many of them an uncontrollable, impulse to go back
to their families, and tell them by word of mouth what
heroes they had been. The satisfaction which very
generally prevailed among the higher officers was ex-
pressed by Charles Lee, in unusually moderate and
accurate language, when he congratulated Washington
on the several advantages which their troops had lately
gained, " though each small, yet in the whole consider-
able ; encouraging to the army and depressing to the
enemy." 2 A sudden access of over-confidence, for the
first and the last time in his military career, had affected
the masculine intellect of Nathanael Greene. That was
a very serious matter ; for Greene was no idle or timid
1 Letter of Nov. 3, 1776, from John McKesson to General George
Ginton, the Governor of New York State. The lady had over-rated her
courage. A week afterwards the General heard from his niece, Miss
Mary Tappen. " Mr. Addison," the girl said, " set out last Sunday with
aunt Ginton for the Camp, but were terrified out of their wits at Flshkill.
I think they are both cowards. O, Uncle, how much I am distressed
when I think on the Situation of this country! Do you think we are in
great danger here this winter ?"
* Lee to Washington; Oct. 27, 1776. Ten days afterwards Lee wrote
to Benjamin Franklin. " We have," he saiH, " by proper measures brought
Mr. Howe to his ne plus ultra. The spirit of our troops is on the whole
good ; and, if America is lost, it is not, in my opinion, owing to want of
courage in your soldiers; but, (pardon me,) to want of prudence in Your
High Mightinesses!"
WHITE PLAINS
theorist, but a man instinctively impelled to translate his
ideas, without delay, into vigorous and fearless action.
Meanwhile General Howe's hesitating strategy, — result-
ing, as it had done, in a series of small reverses alternat-
ing with un remunerative successes, — had produced a
sense of depression in the British ranks. For the first
time since the campaign opened, our officers had become
alive to the peculiar difficulties of the task upon which
they were now engaged. Veterans, who had served with
Prince Ferdinand in the plains of Western Germany,
remembered the excellent roads along which Lord
Granby's cavalry had made forced marches towards the
sound of the cannon ; and the level forests of scientifi-
cally planted fir-trees, bare of underwood, which pre-
sented no unmanageable obstacle to an advancing infantry.
They contrasted those halcyon days with the week
which they had lately spent in traversing fifteen miles
of marsh and thicket, swarming with backwoodsmen
who seemed positively to enjoy the hazards of partisan
•warfare, and who spent hours in crawling about to get
a shot " with their cursed twisted guns," which in their
hands killed at three times the effective range of a regu-
lar musket. 1 A Colonel of the Guards, who had been
invalided home within a few days after White Plains,
told his friends in London that the country was so hilly,
and the rebels such excellent marksmen, that it was
almost impossible to catch them. Most of his comrades
in the Guards, he said, had been very ill with the flux ;
and General Howe was urgent upon the Secretary at
War to send him out one more officer for each com-
pany. 2
If such was the feeling in a crack English regiment,
1 An English officer who made a special study of the shooting in the
American war, and who himself gained proficiency with the rifle, said that
the best hunters of the Indian frontier, in a good light, when there was
no wind to deflect the bullet, could hit a man's head at two hundred yards,
or his body at three hundred, with great certainty.
8 letter, (hitherto unpublished,) from Captain the Hon. Richard Fitz-
patrick, to his brother Lord Ossory, in the Russell collection of the Fox
Correspondence.
FT. II. — VOL. I. Y
322 THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
it may well be believed that dejection and discontent
prevailed among the less military-minded of the German
conscripts. " Our scouting parties," wrote an officer on
Washington's staff, "are very active and successful.
Yesterday they brought in five British prisoners, and
this morning twelve Waldeckers. The latter are
amazed at the kind treatment they receive. They say
they were torn away from their own country, and will
willingly remain among us. They say that, if their
fellow-soldiers knew how they would be treated, and
how plentifully and happily they live, they would lay
down their arms and come amongst us." These poor
wretches did not claim to express the sentiments of
Hessians or Brunswickers ; but the event proved that
they had every title to speak for the Waldeck regiment
That regiment, during the next five years, neither did
nor suffered much ; but at length its turn came. When
hostilities commenced between England and Spain, the
Waldeckers were stationed at points along the coast of
Florida and Louisiana. In September 1781 a detach-
ment of them capitulated on Lake Pontchartrain,
and three entire companies at Baton Rouge. There
is a letter, referring to these occurrences, from the
head-quarters of the battalion at Pensacola, written
by their chaplain. "Is not this a cursed country,"
the reverend gentleman asked, "in which to make
war, where the greater part of a corps may be pris-
oners for five weeks, and the commanding general
not know it with certainty ? " Certainty, however,
soon arrived with the advent of a Spanish fleet, which
took the town of Pensacola, and captured all that
remained of the Waldeckers. Europe was ripe for
the Revolution when a petty German prince could fill
his purse by sending ship-loads of peasants to fight
on the Gulf of Mexico, for a cause that was neither
his nor theirs, against Spaniards who had never before
even heard of Waldeck, any more than the rank and
file of the Waldeckers had any intelligent notion about
Spain.
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The arrival of most re-assuring intelligence from
another quarter enhanced the hopefulness which already
permeated the American ranks. While Washington's
army still lay in Westchester peninsula, it became
known that, for many months to come, all danger from
the North was past and over. On the fourth of October
Sir Guy Carleton set in motion his military and naval
forces, which were both of them excellent in quality
and very formidable in numbers. Benedict Arnold was
already at his post, on the flank of the route which the
English commander was bound to follow. The American
war-ships had started from Crown Point badly provided
in most other respects, but with large and generous
sailing orders. Arnold was instructed not to go beyond
a certain distance down the lake; but everything else
was left to his enterprise and discretion. He set out in
a singular humour, and under very remarkable circum-
stances indeed. The main object of the campaign was
already as good as accomplished, inasmuch as the fame
of him, and of his squadron, had delayed Carleton's
advance during ten precious weeks of summer ; and, on
the other hand, the impending battle might be reckoned
by anticipation as a British victory. Compared with
Carleton's vessels, the American sloops and galleys were
mere cock-boats; carrying fewer cannon of smaller
calibre, unhandy to steer and sail, and beyond any
comparison less abundantly and effectively manned.
On the eve of the encounter Arnold was expecting a
large draft of New England seamen ; but they never
appeared. " I hope to be excused," (he wrote,) "if
with five hundred men, half naked, I should not be able
to beat the enemy." With ships which could not work
to windward, 1 Arnold shunned the open water, and
anchored his Armada, (as it was proudly called by
Americans who were not going to fight on board of it,)
in the channel between Valcour Island and the western
shore. He had borrowed Dr. Price's pamphlet on
1 Richard Varick to General Gates ; Gates to Arnold. American
Archives for October 1776.
va
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324 THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
Civil Liberty, from a friend who had borrowed it of
Franklin, to read if ever he found time to repose on his
cot and nurse his wounded leg; and on deck he enjoyed
a view which lovers of the romantic now go many miles
to contemplate. No less a judge than Nathaniel
Hawthorne rated Lake Champlain as on a level of
beauty with Windermere, and above Loch Lomond. 1
At early morning on the eleventh of October the
sails of the British fleet came into view, moving up the
lake with a fair breeze behind them. Sir Guy Carleton
himself was on one of their quarter-decks. As the
leader of a conjoint expedition, he thought it right to
share the dangers incurred by both the services for
whose conduct he was responsible ; but he did not inter-
fere in matters which lay outside his own profession,
and the manoeuvres were directed by a post-captain of
the Royal Navy. The whole squadron swept around
the southeast point of Valcour Island, placed them-
selves in rear of the enemy, and tacked, or rowed, up-
wind towards the mouth of the channel where the
Americans were stationed. Carleton' s lighter craft,
which were exceedingly numerous, soon drew ahead;
and Arnold sallied forth in his flag-ship, (if such a
name might be applied to a twelve-gun schooner,) in
order to engage them before their more powerful con-
sorts could beat up to their assistance. But his crew
of landsmen ran their vessel aground ; and, at the very
outset of the affair, he lost the only one of his ships
which could even by courtesy be termed a man-of-war.
Arnold transferred himself and his flag to the Con-
gress, which was nothing more than a rowing galley
with mast and sails. Half an hour after mid-day a
score, and over, of Royal gun-boats attacked the
American line at anchor in the narrow strait. It was
Aboukir Bay, on a very small scale, and with a tough
customer on either side. A horde of savages in British
1 Hawthorne's English Note-books. Valcour Island and Crown Point
as well as other places in the vicinity of Lake Champlain, are given in the
map of the Northern Provinces at the end of this volume.
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VALCOUR ISLAND
325
pay, who filled the woods both on the island and the
main-shore, kept the air alive with a storm of bullets :
but their shooting, as usual with the Indians, was detest-
ably bad; and Arnold had protected his decks from
rifle-fire by a barricade of faggots. The English can-
non, plied carefully and at very close quarters, were a
more weighty factor in the business of the afternoon.
Junior officers, who are endowed with dash and emula-
tion, generally contrive to be among the number of the
selected whenever a naval brigade goes on special ser-
vice ; and the squadron on the Canadian station had
contributed the pick of its ward-rooms and gun-rooms
in order to increase the efficiency of Carleton's flotilla
on the Lakes. American sailors, who survived that
day's work, long talked about the skill with which the
commander of a certain English boom-ketch chose a
berth for his vessel, and the precision with which he
pitched his shells into the hostile batteries. His name
has not been recorded ; but there was one young fellow
there present who will be remembered as long as the
history of the sea is read and written. The Carleton
schooner, which was under the charge of a lieutenant
and a pair of midshipmen, alone of the larger British
ships succeeded in reaching the central spot of the ac-
tion ; and she was in a very hot place indeed. The two
senior officers were severely wounded ; and the burden
of the fight devolved upon Edward Pellew, then a lad
of nineteen. Forty years afterwards, as Lord Exmouth,
he bombarded and took Algiers ; and in the course of
that long interval he established his reputation as the
most brilliant known example of a frigate-captain. 1
Pellew's earliest feat in seamanship was to rescue the
Carleton, on that October evening under Valcour Island,
from a position of imminent peril ; and he was rewarded
by being forthwith confirmed in the command of the
vessel which he had saved. The Americans held their
own for five livelong hours. There were no trained
artillerymen on board the Congress ; and Arnold pointed
1 That is Captain Mahan's expressed opinion.
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326 THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
every piece himself, stepping rapidly from gun to gun,
and discharging them as fast as they could be loaded.
The British retired at nightfall, having effected a greater
ruin than they were aware of. The Congress had received
seven shots between wind and water, and another vessel
had been hulled so often that she sank at her moorings
in the twilight. Most of Arnold's ships had nearly all
their officers killed or disabled ; he had expended three-
fourths of his ammunition ; and the next morning would
bring down upon him the whole British fleet, and not
the gun-boats only. When once the Inflexible, with her
eighteen cannon and her thick bulwarks, got within
point-blank range of the Americans, their doom was
certain.
Arnold had no mind to rest passive until his fate
overtook him so long as a single chance remained ; and
he still had two advantages left him, for the night was
hazy, and the wind in his favour. He made his arrange-
ments with speed, and issued to his subordinates minute
and precise instructions. The tactics of the backwoods,
— which he had long ago mastered, and often had prac-
tised, — were cleverly adapted by him to the require-
ments of naval warfare. Every light was extinguished,
except a single lantern upon each poop, to guide the
ship that followed ; and then the squadron issued forth
in a formation which might truly be described as Indian
file. The Congress brought up the rear ; and the entire
column stole, unobserved and in breathless silence,
through an interstice in the line of the British fleet.
The Americans soon got beyond the immediate vicinity
of their enemy ; but the first stage of the retreat was a
short one. They bore up at an island some twelve
miles to the southward, in order to patch their rigging,
and stop the leaks which would have sent most of them
to the bottom before ever they reached a haven of
refuge. The shrouds of the Congress were in tatters,
and she was all but water-logged ; the other large row-
ing-galley, the Washington, could with difficulty be kept
afloat ; and some of their companions were in even sor-
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VALCOUR ISLAND
327
rier case. Two of the armed barges, classed as " gon-
dolas " in the technical phraseology employed on those
inland lakes, had been injured beyond hope of mending,
and were accordingly scuttled and sunk. The rest of
the party, on the afternoon of the twelfth of October,
set forth once more upon their voyage. But it now blew
from the south ; Arnold's vessels, at their very best,
had never sailed well except down-wind; and his
wearied decimated crews, labouring through the suc-
ceeding night, made little progress with their oars. In
the morning of the thirteenth the fog lifted, and dis-
closed the British fleet crowding down under full sail.
Sacrificing the half to save the remainder, Arnold sig-
nalled for the commanders of the sounder vessels in his
fleet to make good their escape ; while he himself, with
the crippled portion of it, courted, and obtained, the
attention of the enemy. Three English ships, carrying
more than two score of cannon between them, were soon
within musket shot. 1 The Washington struck her
colours after a few broadsides; but the Congress, and
four of the gondolas, maintained a running fight during
several hours, and were then steered into a creek ten
miles to the north of Crown Point, driven to land, and
there set on fire. Arnold stayed on board until the
flames had fairly caught; and then, the last man to
leave, he clambered along the bowsprit, and dropped
on to the beach. He always was the last man on such
occasions. The long tale of his exploits is authentic
beyond dispute or suspicion ; for it is preserved in the
public records, and in the national traditions, of a people
who execrated his memory.
Arnold did not affect to disguise the magnitude of the
destruction. " Of our whole fleet," (so he wrote in his
official account,) " we have saved only two galleys, two
1 According to the despatch, brought home by Lieutenant Dacrcs to
the British Admiralty, the action of the thirteenth of October was decided
by the Inflexible, the Carlcton, and the Maria ; which last-named vessel
had Sir Guy on board. The Inflexible was armed with eighteen guns, and
each of the others with twelve.
328 THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
small schooners, one gondola, and one sloop." His
fellow countrymen repaid his frankness with almost
universal approbation and gratitude. He had lost them
a squadron which, but for his personal exertions, would
never have been built ; and he had lost it to some pur-
pose. There were those who blamed him for not having
withdrawn his ships betimes into the comparative safety
of the upper waters, where the river was protected by a
cross-fire from the strongholds of Ticonderoga on the
one bank, and Mount Independence on the other ; 1 but
Arnold's resolution to face a battle had been determined
by broad and far-seeing considerations. Carleton had
unduly delayed his onward movement out of respect for
the preparations which the Americans were making for
his reception ; and no English General after him would
have consented to be hood-winked unless it was clearly
shown that those preparations, which had been so widely
and ably advertised, were a reality, and not a sham.
Gun-boats and galleys, in Arnold's view, were made to
be expended just as much as cartridges ; and any fate
would be better for his ships than to skulk away in
front of the British advance until they were hunted up
against the shore at the head of Lake George, and there
trapped and taken like so many wild fowl in a decoy.
For most assuredly, even at that late season of the year,
Carleton would not have halted short of Albany, or of
New York itself, if the Americans, whether on lake or
land, had made the ignominious confession that they
were afraid of fighting.
And again, in a war extending over an endless tract
of country, — where the occasions for effective action
were of a sudden and unexpected nature, and in infinite
variety, — it was something to know that a leader existed
who was eager to hurl himself at the enemy, and fight
an almost desperate battle as vigorously and obstinately
as if victory were not a bare chance, but a cheerful
probability. The American troops were behindhand in
drill and discipline ; the American generals had no near
1 Letter of General William Maxwell from Ticonderoga ; Oct. 20, 1776.
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VALCOUR ISLAND
329
prospect of a breathing-space during which they might
improve their organisation, and train their regiments ;
and it behoved them to supplement the deficiencies of
the means at their disposal by their own fiery courage
and invincible pertinacity. Arnold's example aroused
an outburst of enthusiasm and martial confidence
throughout the States, and most of all among those of
his countrymen who were nearest to the danger. On J
the afternoon of the thirteenth of October Colonel
Hartley, who was in charge at Crown Point, heard the
reports of heavy guns coming nearer and nearer from
the north, across the surface of the water. He at once
sent off his invalids and his baggage ; and, later in the
day, he fell back upon Ticonderoga. The outside of
that fortress, — so he, and every one else who had a
voice in the matter, were firmly determined, — should,
for that year at least, be the southern limit of the inva-
sion. "The English," (one officer of the garrison
wrote,) "are in possession of Crown Point, and we
expect they may fancy this ground in a day or two.
They must pay a great price for it, however ; as we
value it highly." There was a sufficient force at Ticon-
deroga, and ample stores of food; and, above all, the
Americans had got Arnold back among them, with no
additional bullets in him. 1 The first use that he made
of his shore-legs was to walk round the fortifications,
which had been scientifically laid out by no less a per-
sonage than Thaddeus Kosciusko, the Polish patriot,
who was serving Congress in the capacity of a military
engineer. But the execution of the plan was not so
forward as the security of the place demanded; and
Arnold set all hands to work on the ramparts and
ditches, and mounted, in carefully chosen positions,
every cannon that could be brought to bear. He
assured Schuyler by letter that General Gates and
himself took a bright view of the situation. Their
1 " It has pleased Providence to preserve General Arnold. Few men
ever met with so many hair-breadth escapes in so short a space of time."
Gates to Schuyler; Oct. 15, 1776.
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330 THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
people, (he said,) were daily growing more healthy;
and if properly supported, they made no doubt of stop-
ping the enemy. 1
It was the opinion of General Phillips, who com-
manded the British artillery, that, if the proper meas-
ures had been adopted, Ticonderoga would have fallen
without a blow. He spoke with every right to be heard.
In the course of the next summer he himself had the
satisfaction of proving that his judgement was correct ;
for in July 1777 he dragged his guns to the top of a
steep and rugged hill overlooking the fortress, and
Ticonderoga thereupon was unceremoniously abandoned
by the American garrison. That was an occasion when
Phillips, — a veteran who had served in Germany under
the inspiration of the greatest of war-ministers, — ex-
hibited to the younger generation a characteristic speci-
men of what might justly be styled the Chatham touch.
Carleton, however, in October 1776, considered that he
had effected, if not enough for one year, at any rate as
much as the lateness of the season permitted him to
attempt. Even if he could capture Ticonderoga, his
serious difficulties would only then begin. Co-operation
with Sir William Howe was the express object of the
Northern campaign; and, to do any good, Carleton
should have been at Albany at least six weeks anterior
to the date when he actually reached Crown Point. It
was no light matter, after November had set in, to un-
dertake a winter expedition across a hundred miles of
forest ; beset on his march, in flank and rear, by gather-
ing multitudes of frontiersmen, and with an army in
front of him constantly strengthened by fresh contingents
of militia pouring in from every province of New Eng-
land. Nor would the powers of offence possessed by
the Americans be frittered away, or left unused ; be-
cause, (whoever might be their titular general between
one engagement and another,) their fighting line in the
hour of battle would infallibly be directed by Benedict
Arnold, a leader equally at home on both elements,
1 Arnold to Schuyler ; Oct. 15, 1776.
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331
wherever shot was flying. Carleton almost at once be-
gan to withdraw his army in the direction of Canada ;
and on the third of November his rear-guard evacuated
Crown Point One very large section of his followers
accepted his decision with deep and placid resignation.
The feelings of the Germans were expressed in a letter
written by General Riedesel to his charming wife, who
had already got as far as London on her way to join
him. " Our campaign is at an end ; and I shall go back
to Three Rivers, where I am to be stationed, and await
you with the greatest impatience. Oh how happy I
should be if you came this winter, and I could enjoy
your pleasant society ! The winter-quarters will be very
quiet, and I should be able to live entirely for you.
General Carleton, like a hero, has routed the enemy's
fleet, having left behind him his whole army. He has
very properly spared those who are married ; and, if
this war is carried on in a similar manner next year, I
shall be surer of my life in the midst of it than upon the
parade grounds of Wolfenbiittel and Brunswick."
A cry of relief and delight went up from every town
and village in America where adherents of the Revolu-
tion dwelt. Washington, indeed, was convinced that,
although a part of the danger had been removed, the
nation would have to fight for dear life before the winter
was over ; and he very soberly and briefly congratulated
the President of Congress upon the important intelli-
gence that General Carleton had been obliged to return
to Canada empty-handed. 1 The popular sentiments
and hopes were declared in much more exultant lan-
guage by Robert Morris of Philadelphia, who had ordi-
narily as cool a head as any statesman of his time and
party. " If you keep your ground," (so Morris wrote
to General Gates,) " I think General Washington will
keep his ; and if both do this for the present Fall, and ensu-
ing Winter, the good news I mean to tell you will be
verified. It is that the French are undoubtedly disposed
to assist us in this contest ; and I have little doubt but
1 Washington to the President of Congress ; Peekskill, Nov. 11, 1776.
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332 THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
that they will take part in the war next summer." The
news of Carleton's retreat was received in England with
extreme disappointment and vexation. Lord George
Germaine hated the Governor of Canada, who had de-
clined to job for him, and whose contempt for his char-
acter most disagreeably flavoured the tone of the official
despatches which reached the Colonial Office from
Quebec. It would have gone very hard with Carleton
if his Sovereign had thrown him over ; but George the
Third, in words which became him, told Lord North
that in a certain breast there was a great prejudice, not
unaccompanied by rancour, against Sir Guy ; but that
to recall him from his Government was a cruel sugges-
tion, which the exigency did not authorise. 1 The King
knew honest men when he found them, and cherished
them so long as they would consent to carry on his
policy. Carleton's methods were not the Royal meth-
ods ; but the master never forgot that his servant's
large-minded prudence had kept the province of Canada
inviolate and obedient, amid the crash and wreck of his
transatlantic dominions. Burgoyne, on the other hand,
whom Lord George Germaine and his clique industri-
ously put forward as a rival to Carleton, was not in high
favour at the Court of St. James's. 2 The inevitable
sequel of a military disaster in America was the speedy
re-appearance in London of that very restless General,
who was so keen to give his own version, and to shift the
responsibility from his own shoulders. Before the mid-
dle of December Burgoyne was already about town,
closeted with Secretaries of State, and insinuating in
club and drawing-room that a bold and skilful strategist,
with an eye for country, could easily cut the rebellion in
two by operating in the neighbourhood of Saratoga.
1 George the Third to Lord North; Queen's House, December 13, 1776:
10 minutes past 9 a.m.
2 M Lord George Germaine's people rail against Sir Guy most furiously,
and Lord North's friends seem most displeased that General Burgoyne's
reception at Court was not gracious. There are certainly as great jealous-
ies between the two ministers as between the two generals." Fitzpatrick
to Ossory ; December 1776.
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THE WESTCHESTER LOYALISTS 333
But he did not succeed, to any visible degree, in raising
the spirits of fashionable and influential persons. " Can-
did people," (so Captain Fitzpatrick wrote to his brother
Lord Ossory,) "will see the impracticability of the war
more clearly than ever ; for the Canada expedition has
certainly proved ineffectual, although attended with all
the success they could hope. Burgoyne is not very
communicative ; and it is easy to perceive that he and
Carleton are not friends. I believe Ministry are not
over and above satisfied with the conclusion of their
successful campaign."
The belief that the campaign was already concluded,
which was held both in London and in Philadelphia,
accorded neither with the intentions of the British
General, nor with the apprehensions of his adversary.
Washington was seldom prone to entertain illusions ;
and he never had fewer of them than in the first week
of November 1776. He made an official report to the
effect that the situation was critical and alarming. The
dissolution of his army, (so he foretold,) was fast ap-
proaching. Large numbers were on the eve of their
departure, at a time when the enemy had a very numer-
ous and formidable force, watching an opportunity to
execute their plans for spreading ruin and devastation
throughout the Confederacy. 1 Those were far-reaching
words ; but they fell short of the portentous reality.
On the twenty-first of September the American returns
showed sixteen thousand rank and file fit for duty ; on
the thirtieth of September there were fifteen thousand ;
and on the third of November under thirteen thousand
five hundred. Only a few score soldiers had been killed
or wounded ; and a less creditable reason was required
to account for the enormous waste of these six weeks,
during which the men had never been under-fed, and so
far from over-marched they had only travelled twenty
miles since they first left their cantonments at Haerlem.
1 Washington to the Assembly of Massachusetts ; White Plains, Nov. 6,
1776.
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334 THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
The cause of the diminution of the American army
was written in very legible characters over the face of
the district in which it was stationed; for gentlemen,
who went on a visit to their friends at White Plains,
were encountered along every road by a stream of
militiamen, setting steadily away from camp. Wash-
ington, when he took his rides abroad, was surprised
and shocked at seeing officers and soldiers straggling
all about the neighbourhood on one idle pretence and
another; and most of them, so soon as they found
themselves well beyond the American outposts, ceased
to straggle, and plodded stubbornly homewards to their
native villages in New Hampshire or Connecticut. This
wholesale exodus soon attracted the attention of Euro-
pean military gossips, who had a great idea of Washing-
ton's genius, and a very superficial acquaintance with
his difficulties. A London newspaper announced that
General Washington had dismissed eleven thousand men
to their respective farms, in order that agriculture might
not suffer for want of labour. That sage commander,
(so it was asserted,) had no fear that he could not hold
his own against the invader ; for he had retained with
the colours two-and-twenty thousand troops, the flower
of American chivalry. That estimate of Washington's
numbers was ludicrously inaccurate : but it was literally
true that the spontaneous chivalry of his troops would
before very long be his only resource ; for they were on
the point of being released from all legal obligation to
defend their country. Most of his battalions had been
called out for six months ; and the last of those months
was November. Howe was poorly informed by his
spies ; but he knew the date at which the American
militia had been embodied, the period for which they
were bound to serve, and their very marked propensity
to anticipate, rather than to postpone, the moment of
liberty. It might be taken for granted that, with these
facts before him, the British General would not prema-
turely retire into winter quarters. That was not all, nor
the worst either. The regular Continental regiments,
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THE WESTCHESTER LOYALISTS 335
raised during the siege of Boston, had been enlisted for
the year which expired on the thirty-first of December ;
and Washington thenceforward would have nothing on
which to rely except the voluntary patriotic devotion of
a handful of personal followers. 1
While the Provincial troops dwindled hour by hour in
quantity, their quality, in one serious respect, deteri-
orated rather than improved. Their equipment was
deplorable ; their preparatory training had stopped far
below that line of perfection which befitted them to
take the offensive against well-found regular soldiers;
and men of experience and perception in both camps
were well aware that an army, which is reduced to
stand upon the defence, must sooner or later be dis-
comfited. That view was clearly enforced in a letter
addressed to the authorities of his State by a Maryland
colonel, who, like a true-bred Southerner, attributed
perils which arose from the cruelty of fate to the un-
wisdom of the Northern generals. " Instead of instruct-
ing their troops in military discipline, preparing and
encouraging them to meet their enemies in the fields
and woods, they train them to run away, and make
them believe they never can be safe unless under cover
of an intrenchment, which they would rather extend
from the North to the South Pole than risk an engage-
ment. Discipline is totally neglected ; and yet, after
all, it is the only bulwark in war. Had our troops been
trained better, and worried less with the pickaxe and
the spade, by this time our army would have been in a
condition to have sought the enemy in turn. This can-
not be the case under our present system." 2
1 Colonel Robert H. Harrison to the President of Congress ; Washing-
ton's General Order ; George Clinton to John McKesson, Esq. All these
documents are dated on the same day of October 31, 1776.
" I do not understand," (General Clinton wrote,) " much of the refined
art of war. This nevertheless is too obvious. The enemy are daily in-
creasing their army by new recruits in those parts of the country which
they have already acquired, whilst ours are daily decreasing by sickness,
deaths, and desertion. Add to this, one month more disbands a considera-
ble part of our army. How a new one will be recruited God only knows."
* Colonel Smallwood to the Maryland Council of Safety ; October 1776.
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336
THE AMERICAN REVOU VON
The policy on which this gentleman animadverted
was not a matter of system, but of imperative necessity.
Northern, as well as Southern, generals understood the
full advantages of drill and discipline. Lord Stirling
was something too much of a martinet; Nathanacl
Greene had read his Manual of Exercises even more
assiduously than his Plutarch ; and Washington would
gladly have given all he was worth in the world for a
score of regiments which could march like the English
Footguards. But time and place alike were wanting to
convert his improvised levies into orderly and obedient
veterans, wheeling like clock-work, and springing auto-
matically to the word of command. The fields above
Haerlem, and behind White Plains, did not afford as
secure a parade-ground as Hyde Park or Hounslow
Heath. If the Provincials had neglected to intrench
their front while their companies were instructed in
platoon-firing, and their battalions were being taught to
counter-march, the first sham-fight in which they in-
dulged themselves would have been quickly turned into
a very real catastrophe by a forward movement of the
British infantry. The American commander erelong
gave striking evidence of the high value which he
attached to the routine of military training. In 1778,
during Howe's occupation of Philadelphia, — when the
interposition of twenty miles of country, and the ascer-
tained indolence of the British General, placed Wash-
ington in a position of comparative security, — the
Continental soldiers had no sooner emerged from the
worst hardships of that terrible winter than they were
subjected to a strict course of exercises and manoeuvres.
It was in the stern and rude work-shop of Valley Forge
that Washington fashioned his army into a weapon of
rare temper and flexibility. But, during the operations
on Manhattan Island and Westchester Peninsula, he
was pressed by an enemy of overpowering strength,
whose advanced parties were seldom many furlongs dis-
tant from his line of sentries ; and his solitary resource
was to stave off ruin from day to day by keeping his
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THE ES TCHES TER LOYALISTS 337
troops behind earthworks which, (although novices in
war,) they were skilful to construct and competent to
defend.
Howe, on his part, was firmly resolved to bring the
Americans into the open, and try what they were worth,
man to man. He went to work betimes. Before Oc-
tober ended he despatched General Knyphausen and
two brigades of Hessians, with directions to cross King's
Bridge, and establish themselves in the northern corner
of Manhattan Island. In the night of the third of No-
vember the Provincial sentinels heard a rumbling of car-
riages within the British lines ; and, on the morning of
the fifth, Howe, who had already sent off his stores and
train, broke up his encampment, and transferred the
Royal army to Dobb's Ferry on the Hudson river. He
there was in a position either to cover an attack upon
Fort Washington ; or to force his way up-country to
Albany; or to pass to the opposite bank by aid of his
brother's fleet, and march straight upon Philadelphia,
where he might strike the rebellion in the heart. Wash-
- ington, when the alarm reached him, called his generals
into council, and arranged a provisional disposition of
his army which was reasonably well calculated to meet
each of those three contingencies. He threw one corps
across the river to the westward, and stationed it at
Hackensac in New Jersey under the command of Put-
nam. Heath and his division were sent north to Peeks-
kill, with orders to fortify, and to hold, the pass where
the stream of the Hudson penetrates the gorges of the
Highlands in the neighbourhood of West Point. Charles
Lee meanwhile remained near White Plains, with seven
thousand men, under strict injunctions to keep himself
in readiness for co-operating promptly in whatever direc-
tion Washington, when the future grew clearer to his
mind, might subsequently determine.
The operations on Westchester Peninsula were sig-
nalised by no very dramatic or decisive military inci-
dents; but events had there taken place, not greatly
noticed at the time, which, in such a war as then was
FT. II.— VOL. I.
338 THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
being waged, had more effect upon the ultimate result
than half a dozen battles. A portion of both armies had
seriously misbehaved themselves ; and the gravest and
most permanent consequences ensued from the very
divergent spirit in which that misbehaviour was regarded
by their respective generals. Westchester County every-
where presented an aspect of long-settled and well-
ordered prosperity. The manor-houses, and the better-
most of the farmhouses, had nothing in and about them
which was new, or cheap, or shabby. The carved wain-
scots ; the old grates encased in tiles representing Scrip-
ture scenes, with fender and andirons of solid brass as
brilliant as hands could make them ; the heavy furniture
of mahogany and stamped leather; the tall eight-day
clocks of gilded ebony ; the mirrors loaded with florid
mouldings, which no one with a pure taste in art would
have devised, but which, when they had hung on the
wall for a century, no one who had the sense of associa-
tion would ever part with ; the perfection of needlework
in the curtains, the screens, the cushions, and more es-
pecially in the bed-quilts ; the glass cupboards with their
display of antique plate, and high-coloured Lowestoft
porcelain ; the Delft-ware, the pewter, the copper vessels,
the great wooden bowls for kitchen use, which the Ind-
ians fashioned from the knots of the maple tree ; —
everything was solid, everything was genuine, and, above
all, everything was scrupulously and religiously clean.
For the mansions of the country gentlemen, and the
dwellings of their leading tenants, were maintained up
to a standard of neatness surpassing the extreme point
even of Anglo-Saxon respectability. There was a very
large Dutch element in the population ; and Dutch Chris-
tian names, and surnames, may still be read in large
numbers at the foot of the Addresses and Resolutions
which went across the Atlantic to assure King George
of the affection with which he was regarded by his good
people of Westchester. The fittings and utensils of these
old-world habitations were daintily kept ; but they were
kept for use. There often was only too much mulled
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THE WESTCHESTER LOYALISTS 339
wine in the silver tankards, and rack-punch in the china
bowls. At Christmas the stupendous brick ovens were
filled three times a day; — first with generous loaves of
wheat and rye ; then with chicken, and quail, and veni-
son pasties ; and lastly with long rows of fruit and mince-
pies. At the back of the furnace was a huge log, which
had been transported thither by the united efforts of
several serving men ; and the iron dogs were piled with
a blazing mass of hickory billets, in front of which tur-
keys, and geese, and large joints of meat, were turned
on the spits by one of the little negroes who peopled
the kitchen of every great homestead. 1
Nowhere in Europe, nor in America, was there more
universal ease and plenty, or a larger infusion of that
natural and sincere conservatism which is based upon
content. Westchester County, and no wonder, was to
a marked degree a Loyalist district. The ablest of the
Tory controversialists, — who evoked in the greatest in-
tensity the enthusiasm of his own party, and the anger
of the other, — had published a famous series of pam-
phlets under the title of a Westchester Farmer. That
was the appellation adopted by the Reverend Samuel Sea-
bury, the Rector of St. Peter's Church in the town of
Westchester, who endured a very hot persecution at the
hands of his Whig adversaries with dignified fortitude.
His character and conduct won for him in many quarters
a tribute of sympathy and respect, which gradually deep-
ened into a sentiment little short of reverence. After
the Revolution he was chosen as the first Bishop of the
Protestant Episcopal Church in America; a function
which he long and worthily discharged. 2
Seabury was a farmer only in the sense that he culti-
vated his glebe ; but he knew how farmers thought, and
he could write what they cared to read. Neither Cobbett
1 The substance, and much of the language, in this paragraph are
taken from a chapter on the manners and customs of Westchester County,
by Mr. Thomas Scharf.
2 Tyler's Literary History; Vol. I., chapter xv. History of West'
ehester County; pages 600 and 601.
Z2
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340 THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
nor Cobden ever clothed an economical proposition in
more pithy and homely words than Seabury's argument
against the commercial policy of the Continental Con-
gress in September 1774. Congress, by way of retali-
ation for the tea-duty, had recommended an agreement
against exporting goods to Great Britain and Ireland.
That agreement, (so the Westchester farmer truly as-
serted,) would ruin the market for American flax-seed,
— a commodity for which the Ulster Irish had always
been the best customers. That very year, according to
his own account, he had threshed and cleaned up eleven
bushels of the seed. " The common price now is at least
ten shillings. My seed, then, will fetch me five pounds
ten shillings. But I will throw in the ten shillings for
expenses. There remain five pounds. In five pounds
are four hundred three pences. Four hundred three-
pences, currency, will pay the duty upon two hundred
pounds of tea, — even reckoning the exchange with Lon-
don at two hundred per cent. I use in my family about
six pounds of tea. Few farmers in my neighbourhood
use so much ; but I hate to stint my wife and daughters,
or my friendly neighbours when they come to see me.
Besides, I like a dish of tea too, especially after a little
more than ordinary fatigue in hot weather. Now two
hundred pounds of tea, at six pounds a year, will just
last thirty-three years and four months ; so that, in order
to pay this monstrous duty on tea, which has raised all
this confounded combustion in the country, I have only
to sell the produce of a bushel of flax-seed once in thirty-
three years." 1
The political opinions, which Seabury humorously
and fearlessly expressed in print, were held by a very
large proportion of those agriculturists who tilled the
soil of the peninsula on which, during the last fortnight
of October and the first week of November, the Royal
and the Republican armies were contending. Before the
war broke out these Westchester copyholders enrolled
themselves by their hundreds in Loyal Associations;
1 Tyler's Literary History ; Vol. I., chapter xv., section 3.
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THE WESTCHESTER LOYALISTS
341
and they proclaimed their attachment to the Throne,
and their detestation of revolutionary principles, in very
spirited language, and at the inordinate length which
was usual in all public documents issued on either side
of the question in every colony. 1 When the poll for
delegates to Congress was held at White Plains, a long
procession marched from the Tory tavern to the Court-
house, lodged a protest against the legality of the pro-
ceedings, and returned, "singing, as they went, the
grand and animating Song of
God save great George our King ! "
Armed parties scoured the country at night, throwing
down Whig fences, and cropping the manes and tails of
horses which grazed in Whig paddocks. And, — when
the New York Committee of Safety had parked near
King's Bridge all the artillery which could be collected
in their city, — the custodians awoke one morning to
find the guns spiked, and most of them with large stones
rammed forcibly down their muzzles. Several hundred
cannon had been thus treated; and the number of
persons concerned was notoriously very large. Many
arbitrary arrests were made, and very harsh means
were adopted in order to induce confession, or to extort
testimony ; but the exploit was so much in unison with
public opinion in Westchester County that the Revolu-
tionary authorities were unable to bring the charge
home to a single one of the perpetrators.
The welcome extended to the Royal army by the
rural population of Westchester County did not outlast
their first experience of the very peculiar conduct by
which some of our soldiers, and notably our foreign
1 The creed of Westchester Toryism is vigorously expounded in a couple
of sentences extracted from one of these manifestoes. " Let us of Cort-
landt's Manor clear ourselves of the general imputation. We never con-
sented to Congresses or Committees ; we detest the destruction of private
property ; we abhor the proceedings of riotous and disorderly people ;
and, finally, we wish to live and die the same loyal subjects that we have
ever been to his most Sacred Majesty George the Third."
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342 THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
auxiliaries, were accustomed to requite hospitality.
"The enemy have treated all here without discrimi-
nation. The distinction of Whig and Tory has been
lost in one general scene of ravage and desolation." 1
Those were Washington's words. They have obtained
that corroboration, which a statement made by him
never needs, from narratives written by prominent oppo-
nents of the American Revolution ; for the story of the
usage inflicted upon Loyalists in Westchester County
by the Royal army is mainly derived from Loyalist
sources. The work of devastation commenced with
the smaller live-stock. Most Hessian regiments con-
tained veterans of the Seven Years' War who long ago
had learned how to find their way about the inside of a
hen-roost ; and the poultry yards were at once ransacked
without any plea of military necessity, except the neces-
sity which a grenadier felt to have a duck or a capon
for his supper. The herds and flocks were next con-
verted into beef and mutton, without a single halfpenny
of payment to their owners ; and the Germans especially
luxuriated at free quarters in a country district which
was noted for the curing of hams, and the manufacture
of sausage-meat. Emboldened by impunity, the spoiler
soon carried his operations into the inmost recesses of
the home. The grand parlour of the Dutch household, —
an apartment sacredly reserved for occasions of high
ceremony, — was profaned and pillaged without any
consideration for the political creed of the inmates.
Those fine white tiles of the Van Cortlandt Manor-
house, which are still prized as specimens of old colonial
decoration, were torn from their sockets, and used as
platters by the soldiery. Before three weeks had passed,
the people of 'Westchester, though untouched in life and
limb, were as utterly denuded and impoverished as if an
incursion of Iroquois and Seneca warriors had swept the
county. The Royal army was attended by a train of
loose women, mostly brought from Europe, but in part
1 Washington to Governor Livingston of New Jersey ; White Plains,
November 7, 1776.
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THE WESTCHESTER LOYALISTS 343
recruited from the least reputable streets of certain
American sea-ports. Their presence at Boston had,
of recent years, contributed not a little to unite that
sober and austere community in its aversion to a mili-
tary occupation. When this flock of harpies descended
upon the villages of a quiet country-side, — with their
intimate knowledge of what was worth taking, and of
the most likely places in which to find it, — the losses
endured by a decent housewife were aggravated by a
sense of altogether intolerable insult. These odious
hussies have been described by indignant American
Loyalists in the round and downright phrases which
Smollett and Fielding so liberally employed, and which,
when treating such a topic, might be permitted even to
the delicacy of a modern author. 1
Joseph Galloway, an eminent Tory lawyer and poli-
tician, was expelled by popular violence from his home
in Pennsylvania, and forced to seek a refuge in England.
He there faithfully and boldly served the Royal cause
by his pen ; and he was not sparing in his remonstrances
against the excesses and errors by which that cause was
disgraced and enfeebled on the further side of the At-
lantic Ocean. He confessed with shame that, in the
parts of America to which our armies had penetrated,
friend and foe, ally and rebel, had met with the same
fate; — "a series of continued plunder," (such was his
actual language,) that could not fail to create dislike,
even in the breast of fidelity, to a service which, under
the pretence of giving the Loyalists protection, robbed
them in many instances even of the necessaries of life. 2
1 Volume I. of the History of New York during the Revolutionary
War, by Thomas Jones, Justice of the Supreme Court of the Province.
The first paragraph of the seventh chapter contains some very outspoken
remarks. The part played by " the wives and mistresses " of the soldiers
in the spoliation of Westchester County is related by Mr. Henry Dawson,
that fair-minded and painstaking writer of our own generation, whose
sympathies are strongly with the rural Tories of 1776.
a Joseph Galloway's " Reply to the Observations of Lieutenant General
Sir William Howe on a Pamphlet entitled Letters to a Nobleman ; in whioh
his Misrepresentations arc detected, and those Letters are supported by a
variety of new Matter and Argument"
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344 THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
The faults, at first, were not all on one side ; and it
seemed probable that, unless speedy measures of repres-
sion were taken by the commanders of both armies, the
unfortunate civil population would be ground to powder
as between the upper and the nether mill-stone. A cer-
tain number of the Americans, both men and officers,
had been guilty of grave irregularities. Their Adjutant
General complained feelingly that those who enforced
discipline upon new troops, among whom the principles
of democracy so universally prevailed, must expect to
be calumniated and detested. 1 But Congress had se-
lected a general who was not afraid of his own men.
Washington was sternly resolved that inhumanity and
dishonesty should not go unchecked on the plea that
they were sins to which the soldiers of democracy were
especially prone. In September 1776, he cashiered an
ensign "for the infamous crime of plundering the in-
habitants of Haerlem;" on the last day of October he
issued a fiery proclamation, threatening severe penalties
against officers who had taken horses off the Westchester
farms, and appropriated them to their own private use ; a
and, a week later on, he seized his opportunity for
making an example of some culprits high in rank, and
thereby administered a death-blow to systematic bri-
gandage in the armies which he personally commanded.
The watchers at Fishkill, on the Hudson river above
West Point, reported that, from six in the evening of
the fifth of November until very late, the glare of a
great fire had been seen in the southeast quarter, and
that fears were entertained for the safety of the town of
Rye. 8 As a matter of fact, the light came from a nearer
point on the horizon. No sooner was it rumoured in
1 Colonel Reed to his wife; October II, 1776.
■ " Can it be possible that persons bearing Commissions, and fighting
in such a cause, can degrade themselves into plunderers of horses? The
General hopes every officer will set his face against it in future, and does
insist that the Colonels, and commanding officers of Regiments, imme-
diately inquire into the matter, and report to him who have been guilty of
these practices."
■ John McKesson to General George Clinton; Fishkill, November 5, 1776.
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THE WESTCHESTER LOYALISTS 345
Washington's camp that Howe had evacuated his posi-
tion at White Plains than a parcel of militiamen, — prin-
cipally drawn, it is to be feared, from the State of
Massachusetts, — under the command of a certain
Major Austin, descended upon the village in order to
give their political opponents a lesson, and pay them-
selves very handsomely for the trouble of teaching it.
They began by plundering ; and a curiously exact inven-
tory of their acquisitions is still in existence. One
woman lost two skips of bees, forty-three pounds of
butter, a lead glue-pot, and a tea canister, which in that
Loyalist region was probably well filled. Another was
robbed of ten yards of taffeta, a light blue silk quilt, a
satin cloak, a white satin hat, and all her father's title-
deeds and papers. When the larders and wardrobes
had been stripped bare, the inhabitants, young and old,
were turned out of doors, and fire was put to the eaves.
One lady, in her distress, hung on the Major's arm, and
appealed to his honour as a soldier; but he shook her
off, and cursed her for a Tory. The Court-house, the
Presbyterian Meeting House, and the greater part of
the private dwellings, were destroyed. Major Austin
afterwards admitted that he had received no orders to
burn houses from any superior authority ; and General
Heath, at the time, noted in his journal that the outrage in-
spired great disgust in the whole of the American army. 1
The very next morning Washington eagerly assured
that army that his sentiments on the matter were the
same as theirs. It was with the utmost astonishment
and abhorrence, (he announced,) that the General had
1 Something has been made of a letter written on the seventh of
November by Colonel Huntingdon to Governor Trumbull of Connecticut,
in which the Colonel spoke with satisfaction of " the burning of a few
houses;" but the letter expressly relates to circumstances which accom-
panied the retirement of the Americans from White Plains on the thirty-
first of October. On that occasion General Heath, by orders from Wash-
ington, destroyed the barracks which the Continental troops had themselves
erected for their own accommodation; as well as some barns and a house,
containing forage and public stores, which there was no time to remove
before the enemy entered the place.
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346 THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
been informed how some base and cowardly wretches
last night set fire to the Court-house, and other build-
ings, which the enemy had abandoned. Their com-
rades, however, might rely upon it that the criminals
should be brought to justice, and meet with the punish-
ment they deserved. 1 Those were no idle menaces.
Amid all the reverses and anxieties which now came
thick upon him, Washington never for a moment lost
sight of Major Austin. A Court-martial sat ; and, when a
hitch in the proceedings occurred, another was convoked.
Austin was dismissed from the service, and delivered over
to the civil authorities of his native State, by whom he was
committed to prison on a charge preferred under the
ordinary law. Condign punishment was inflicted upon
another officer, who appears to have been a favourite
among the worst of the rank and file. When the marauders
were dividing the booty, they were overheard to say that
Captain Ford must have an equal share, although he had
already secured for himself " quite a number of little no-
tions." He was accordingly allotted a green silk gown,
and other valuable articles ; but he soon found his way
into the common gaol of Dutchess County in the State
of Pennsylvania, where history has left him to languish. 8
Sir William Howe, speaking in Parliament after his
return to England, claimed to have taken every means
to prevent the devastation and destruction of the coun-
try, and reminded his hearers that he had been severely
condemned by certain persons for the tenderness with
which he had treated rebels. 8 Merciful and kindly by
nature he undoubtedly was. The political party, to
which he belonged, held that America could never be
reclaimed by severity ; and the men, and the women
too, with whom he habitually lived when in London,
did not conceal their disapprobation of harsh and vio-
lent measures. 4 But he was lazy and careless ; and he
1 General Order; Head-quarters, White Plains, November 6, 1776.
3 American Archives for November 1776.
• Sir William Howe's speech of April 22, 1779.
4 Lady Sarah Bunbury asked whether there ever was such a brute as
General Lurgoyne, who could find time to compose his bombast nonsense
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THE WESTCHESTER LOYALISTS 34/
shrank from the unpopularity which a strict disciplina-
rian must always be prepared to face. The allegation
that Howe was very slow to reprove or punish even
those excesses, which were committed within the range
of his personal observation, rests upon the most unim-
peachable authority. The Honourable Thomas Jones,
one of the Royal Judges in the Supreme Court of New
York Province, was an ardent and lifelong Loyalist.
He did not love, and had no reason to love, the Revolu-
tionary party in America ; his relations with whom may
properly, and literally, be described as internecine.
When the war was over, his life was declared forfeit,
and his estate was confiscated, by the New York Act
of Attainder ; and he, on the other hand, has left on
record his opinion that the twenty-six hundred Provincial
soldiers, who were taken prisoners at Fort Washington,
should all have been put to the sword. 1 He consoled
his exile, which only ended at his death, by compiling
about his rapid advance of eighteen miles in a fortnight, while he neglected
to allay the anxieties of friends at home by sending to the War Office a
return of the killed and wounded. "Only think too of the horrors of em-
ploying the Indians, and allowing them to fight their own way ! I am
not much pleased with my friend Sir William Howe neither; for, though
a most humane man himself, he has not contrived to keep strict discipline
in his army." That was what the mother of the Napiers wrote; and that
was what her sons were brought up to think. They were not the worse
soldiers on account of it.
Lady Sarah's detestation of cruelty was quite impartial. She had
been taken in by the amazing legend which was circulated in London
after the battle of Lexington. " I suppose," she wrote, " you are viollent
for your American friends. I hope they are a good sort of people, but I
don't love presbetiryans, and I love the English soldiers, so that I at
present have a horror of those who use them ill beyond the laws of war,
which scalping certainly is." Letter of July 6, 1775, in the Correspond-
ence of Lady Sarah Lennox, published by the Countess of Ilchester and
Lord Stavordale. The editors have placed before the reader full and well
ordered materials for forming an opinion about a charming personality;
and they then have courteously and wisely left him to form that opinion
for himself.
1 " The most rigid severity at the first would have been the greatest
mercy and lenity in the end. How did Oliver Cromwell conquer Ireland?
By the storm of Drogheda, and putting every soul to the sword. Had
this precedent been followed at Fort Washington in November 1776,
America would have been this day still a territory of Great Britain."
Jones's History 0/ New York; Volume II., chapter ii.
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348
THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
a vast history of his native province and city, from the
commencement of the disturbances down to the Treaty
of Peace in September 1783. Judge Jones was a landed
proprietor in Long Island ; and he has borne testimony
to the surprise and disappointment of the residents in
that well-affected district when it was brought home to
their perceptions that plunder was rather encouraged
than discouraged by some principal officers of the Royal
army. He relates how a gentleman of fortune and
character, as warm and faithful a subject of the Crown
as ever had an existence, possessed a horse worth at
least a hundred and fifty guineas, a descendant of the
famous Wildair. An English cavalry colonel saw, and
fancied, the animal ; told the owner to dismount in the
middle of the road, and hand the horse over to his own
orderly ; and bade him thank his stars that he was
allowed to keep the saddle. All the fat cattle on the
island, including those belonging to Judge Jones him-
self, were seized for the use of the troops. " The
owners," (the Judge wrote,) " grumbled not. The chief
of them were steady Loyalists, and were happy in hav-
ing it in their power to assist the Royal army. Upon
the close of the campaign applications were made for
payment, agreeable to the General's promises. Not-
withstanding which, in violation of his word, and of the
public faith by him pledged, not a man ever received a
farthing. Some of the applicants were damned for
rebels, and ordered about their business. Others were
threatened with the Provost Marshal for their impu-
dence. Others were told their only remedy was against
the original captors, and to them they might apply for
redress." 1
So it was on Long Island ; so it had been during the
still earlier occupation of Staten Island ; and, by the
time Howe entered New York city, violence and ra-
pacity were ingrained habits among an ever-increasing
proportion of his army. The troops broke open the
City Hall, and carried away the books, and the mathe-
1 Jones's History of New York; Volume L, chapter vi.
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THE WESTCHESTER LOYALISTS 349
matical and philosophical apparatus, belonging to the
College, which had been stored in that building for
greater safety ; and a collection of good pictures shared
the same fate. They plundered likewise the Corpora-
tion library, and the subscription library of the town,
containing between them no fewer than sixty thousand
volumes, which were publicly hawked about for sale
by private soldiers, and by their female companions.
Judge Jones relates that he might have acquired a law
library for next to nothing ; and he saw in a drink-shop
near forty books, — bound, lettered, and ornamented
with a coat of arms, — which were on pawn for liquor,
ticketed by the bar-keeper at the value of from one to
three glasses of spirits apiece. " To do justice even
to rebels," (so the Judge proceeded to say,) " let it here
be mentioned that, though they were in full possession
of New York for nearly seven months, and had in it
at times above forty thousand men, neither of these
libraries were ever meddled with ; the telescopes, which
General Washington took, excepted. Several rebel
soldiers were indicted for some petty larcenies, tried,
convicted, and punished by order of the Court, without
tended the trials, heard the evidence, and, upon their
conviction, declared that ample justice was done them,
and thanked the Judge for his candor and impartiality
during the course of the trials." 1 That was the con-
trast, according to the close personal observation of an
able magistrate and a staunch Tory, between the army
of Washington and the army of Howe. If such things
were done to the loyal population of the islands in
New York Bay, and the streets of New York city,
under the very eye of the British General, it was not
difficult to foresee what would happen when, outside
the purview of his own immediate supervision, his de-
tached parties were ranging far and wide over the
inland parishes of the rebellious colony of New Jersey.
1 Jonc»'« History of New York ; Volume I., chapter vii.
any interference of the militai
Their officers at-
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APPENDICES
APPENDIX I
See page 126
Washington, during many years, suffered humbly and re-
signedly at the hands of the Reverend William Gordon. He
acceded to the historian's frequent demands for a sight of
important documents, stipulating only that his own personal
reputation should never be defended, or exalted, at the expense
of his subordinates. He wrote, at some length, in reply to
queries, which often were silly enough, at times when he him-
self was oppressed by a multitude of urgent and vexatious
cares. In February 1778, amid the labours and distresses of
Valley Forge, he was at the pains to assure Gordon that there
was no truth in a report that he would shortly lay down his
military command ; although if ever the voice of his country,
and not of a fraction, called him to resign, he would do it, (he
said,) with as much pleasure as ever the weary traveller retired
to rest. Three years later, — halfway between Benedict Arnold's
treachery, and the expedition to Yorktown, — the generalissimo
thought it necessary to apologise, on the score of pressing occu-
pations, for not having written to the clergyman as often as the
clergyman wrote to him. When the war was over, Gordon
spent three weeks at Mount Vernon, rummaging among the
heaps of boxes in which the whole Head-quarters correspond-
ence of the Revolution was stored; and in 1788, when the
History had not as yet been published in America, its author
received a long and civil reply to a letter in which he enquired
of Washington whether he had ever been invited by his ad-
mirers to make himself a king.
The American edition of Gordon's history appeared in 1 789 ;
and then Washington's eyes were opened, and his long-suffer-
ance, but not his courtesy, came to an end. In October 1797,
3So
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APPENDICES
when he had laid down the Presidency of the United States,
and had retired into private life, Gordon appears to have
written him a letter reminding him that, during the eight years
of his office, he had been a most neglectful correspondent, and
urging him to atone for his remissness by transmitting a mi-
nute account of American politics, which then were in an
exceedingly, (though not unusually,) inflamed condition. On
this occasion Washington spoke out. The opening paragraph
of his answer ran as follows : —
u Reverend Sir, your favor of the 20th of February has been
received ; and I am indebted to you for many other unac-
knowledged letters. The truth is, I soon found, after entering
upon the duties of my late public station, that private corre-
spondence did not accord with official duties; and, being
determined to perform the latter to the best of my abilities, I
early relinquished the former, when business was not the sub-
ject of them."
" For politics," (thus the letter ended,) 11 1 shall refer you
to the Gazettes of the country, with which I presume you are
acquainted ; and with respect to other matters I have nothing
which would be entertaining, or worth narrating."
Those are the last lines of the correspondence which remain
on record ; and there is every reason to suppose that, on the
part of Washington, the rest was silence.
APPENDIX II
See page 218
Extracts from Amos FarnswortKs diary for 1775-6 1
Sunday May ye 14. Felt calm and serious. And I was
filled with Anxious Desires after Holiness. And I Resolved
Afresh to live and Devote myself more Strictly to Gods service
than ever Yet I have Done. God Enabel me to keep this
Resolution !
Sunday May 21. Attended Prayer on the Common in the
morning. After that retired for Secret Prayer. About ten
1 The spelling has been corrected, in a few instances, for the sake of
intelligibility.
TV .
352 THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
went to the Chapel, and herd the Reverend Doctor Langdon
from the Hebrews 2, 10. He encorridged us to Enlist under
the Great General of our Salvation.
Saturday May ye 27. About ten At night marched to
Winnisimit ferry, whare thare was A Schooner and Sloop
Afiring with grate fury on us thare. But thanks be unto God,
that gave us the Victory at this time, for throu his Providence
the Schooner ran Aground, and we sot fire to hur and con-
sumed hur thare, and the Sloop receved much damraage.
Thanks be unto God that so little hurt was Done us when the
Balls Sang like Bees Round our heds !
Thursday June ye 1. Thare was Sheep, and Catel, and
horses, to ye Amount of fore or five hundred sheep, twenty or
thirty Cattel, and a number of horses brought along, that our
Peopel took from the Regulors of Moddles island. Blessed be
God in that he has Delivered into our hands So much of thare
goods and Substance, And in saving of us in the late Battle !
Surely God fote the Battle, And not we !
Saturday June ye 3rd. Paraded with the battalion, and saw
two men whipt for Stealing, and Another drommed out of ye
Camps. O what a pernitious thing it is for A man to steal and
cheat his feller nabors, and how Provocking it is to God !
Wednesday August 30th. The Enemy has Bin a Cannonad-
ing of us : But do little hurt. I found a young Gentleman that
I Could Freely convers with on Speritual things. I find God
has a Remnant in this Depraved, and Degenerated, and gloomy
time.
Monday : Sept. 25th. One man was whipt and Drummed
out for Stealing: he was a bold and unashamed wretch. O
that men was wise that thay would consider on thare latter
End!
Tuesday Oct. 17th. Our people went this evening with two
floating Batteryes Down Cambridge River to fire on Boston :
fired Sumtime, when one of thare Cannon split: wounded
Eight Men, Whare of One Died. O the Sad Effect of war !
When will the time Com when we need lam war No more?
Thursday Oct. 19th. A Great talk of more troops being
Sent to Boston, But our Men aint Scared at trifels. I would
that our People had as good courage in the Speritual warfare
as they have in the Temporal one.
Saturday Dec. 23rd. And now O Lord we are in troble.
Boston is a seat whare our Unnatural Enemyes are in Posses-
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APPENDICES
353
sion. The people of Boston that are our friends have bin
forced to leave the town, or be shut up thare amongst our foes.
We have Sinned as a Continent ; we have sinned as a Province :
we have Sinned as connected with a town, and as a Famerly,
and Privates. But, O God, do not cast off this thy Land that
thou hast Garded so long !
Monday 25 Dec. I fell dull in Duty, and yet I dont see ray
sin so as to foliar it as I ought I am a great sinner, yet I dont
see my sin aright.
Lords-day Feby 25 th. Went to Meeting, and heard Rev.
Mr. Emerson of Concord. I pray God grant that by the
Preaching of this worthy Man I may be stirred up to my duty,
and to a holy walk with God.
March 20, 1778. I being prest with a sense of my duty in
coming to the Lord's table, I went to our Pastor to offer myself
to the Communion. I had thoughts of turning back ; but Con-
sidering how unsoldierlike it was to turn the back I went for-
ward, and was in some Mesure enabled to lay open my Hart
and desire to him, and he delt faithfully and kindly with me.
Those, to whom Ralph Waldo Emerson has been a guide
in the conduct of life, may note with interest that the gift of
imparting a healthy and cheerful view on Ethical questions was
ancestral in his family.
FT. II.— VOL. L
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